Med Annex 3 looked more like a storage closet than a place where people got told how they’d failed.

  The door hissed open at his approach. Inside, the room was barely big enough for a metal desk, two chairs, and a wall screen. No windows. No plants. Just white panels, a faint antiseptic sting in the air, and the soft hum of Aurora hardware behind the walls.

  “Cadet Mercer,” a voice said.

  He stopped just over the threshold.

  The medic from the debrief stood by the desk, white-striped uniform neat, slate tucked under one arm. Up close she looked older than he’d first thought. Not old, but with the kind of tired you got from watching too many things bleed.

  “Ma’am,” Kaden said.

  She nodded to the chair facing the screen. “Sit.”

  He sat.

  The chair was bolted down. Everything in this place was bolted down.

  Aurora flicked a prompt into the corner of his vision.

  [PERSONAL DEBRIEF – MERCER, KADEN]

  [STATUS: IN PROGRESS]

  The medic took the other chair. She set her slate on the desk and tapped it once. The wall screen came alive with the Academy seal, then pared down to a simple label:

  DEBRIEF: INCIDENT HULK-3B – MEDICAL REVIEW

  She watched him for a moment, as if gauging whether he was going to bolt.

  “You know why you’re here,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kaden said.

  “Good. Saves time.” She leaned back slightly. “I’m Lieutenant Corin. Medical staff, Academy node three. I’ve got full access to the incident footage and Aurora’s analysis. This is a performance review, not a disciplinary session. Understood?”

  Performance. The word sat weird in his stomach.

  “Understood,” he said.

  “If you become disruptive, I’ll sedate you,” she added, almost absently. “I’m not saying that to threaten you. I’m saying it so you understand we’re going to get through this one way or another. I’d prefer you stay conscious.”

  “Understood,” he repeated.

  Corin seemed satisfied. She turned to the screen and flicked her fingers. The seal vanished. Jensen’s POV replaced it, frozen at chest height, looking down the corridor just before the turret fell.

  “We’ll be using both your feed and Cadet Jensen’s,” she said. “We’ll go step by step. I’ll ask what you were trying to do. You’ll answer truthfully. If you lie, Aurora flags it. That wastes everyone’s time. Agreed?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good.” She tapped her wrist once. “Begin.”

  The footage rolled.

  Kaden watched the run for the third time today. First when he’d lived it. Second in the debrief room. Now here, in silence, the sound muted.

  They saw the drones. The advance. His own sloppy stance, his aim bobbing more than he’d thought. The turret slamming through the ceiling.

  Then the shot.

  Freeze-frame: the shard of metal mid-flight, Jensen’s chest plate curving inward around it.

  CADET JENSEN – HP: 54%

  “Here,” Corin said. “Three seconds into live fire. Up until this point, you’re in a simulation. After this, you’re not.”

  She glanced at him. “You following?”

  “I’m following,” Kaden said quietly.

  “Good.” She moved the footage forward a heartbeat, then froze it again. “Now.”

  Kaden’s own camera swung toward Jensen as he fell.

  “What did you see?” Corin asked.

  “He took the hit,” Kaden said. “I heard him make a sound. I saw him go down. His HP bar dropped.”

  “And?” Her tone stayed level.

  “I knew it was bad,” Kaden said. “Armor shouldn’t cave like that from sim rounds. And… the HP never drops that fast in sims.”

  Corin eyed him for a moment, then nodded toward the screen. “What did you think his chances were, right then?”

  Kaden swallowed. “I didn’t think in numbers, ma’am. I just knew… if anyone was going to keep him from dying, someone had to get over there.”

  “Did you consider waiting for the med team?” she asked.

  “They said three minutes in the debrief,” Kaden said. “His timer said under a minute. Waiting wasn’t an option.”

  Corin didn’t respond to that. She made a small gesture and the footage rolled on.

  His own POV, sprinting. Jensen’s POV, tilted and disorienting, catching glimpses of ceiling and light panels and Kaden’s armor.

  The video split. Jensen’s view on the left, Kaden’s on the right. Between them, a clean overlay: vitals, oxygenation, Aurora’s internal injury model rendered as a wireframe torso with a spreading red bloom in the chest.

  “Pause,” Corin said softly.

  Everything stopped. Numbers froze mid-tick.

  She pointed at the wireframe. “This is what Aurora modeled in the first three seconds after impact. The fragment penetrated the chest plate, deflected off the sternum, and destroyed most of the left lung. It also shredded major vessels. See here.”

  She tapped a section. The red brightened.

  “Estimated bleed rate: extreme. Without intervention, time-to-system failure was modeled at forty-five to fifty seconds. That’s under ideal conditions. You weren’t in ideal conditions.”

  Kaden’s throat felt tight. “Right.”

  “You reached him in eight seconds,” Corin said. “That’s faster than average. You had no cover. You went anyway. That’s one data point.”

  “Didn’t help,” Kaden said.

  “If you want to sulk, do it after the review,” Corin said, tone still mild. “We’re not at the judgment part yet. Right now we’re collecting facts. Understood?”

  He bit down on whatever he was about to say. “Understood.”

  “Good.” She resumed the footage, slower now.

  He watched his own hands fight with the armor latches in half-speed. Jensen’s vitals pulsed in the center panel. Heart rate spiking. O2 dropping. HP ticking down in uneven chunks.

  31%

  29%

  “Here,” Corin said, pausing again. “What was your plan at this moment?”

  “Get the armor off,” Kaden said. “See how bad it was. Use the sealant. Stop the bleeding.”

  “External bleeding,” Corin said. “What do you know about internal bleeds?”

  “Not much,” he admitted. “Just that they’re bad.”

  Her mouth twitched, almost like she wanted to smile and thought better of it.

  “That’s accurate,” she said. “Not particularly useful, but accurate.”

  She pointed at the HUD in his own feed.

  “You see this icon?” she asked.

  Kaden squinted. In the corner of his vision, above Jensen’s HP bar, a small, dim symbol pulsed. He hadn’t noticed it at the time. A tiny vial with a waveform beside it.

  “That’s your trauma injector indicator,” Corin said. “You had one shot in your kit. Do you remember the training on its use?”

  “Barely,” Kaden said. “They said it was for shock. And pain. And that it can crash someone’s system if you use it wrong.”

  “Yes,” Corin said. “Low blood volume, compromised heart, wrong timing, and you can stop them faster instead of slowing things down. So you decided not to use it?”

  “I…” He stared at the frozen image of his own hands. “I didn’t think about it. I was focused on stopping the bleeding and getting the armor off. I didn’t remember it was there until afterward.”

  Corin nodded once. “Honest. Good. Most cadets in their first live trauma aren’t calmly running down checklists. They latch onto the one thing they remember and do that as hard as they can.”

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  That tracked, depressingly well.

  “What should I’ve done?” he asked.

  “Hold that question,” she said. “Let’s finish watching before we start rewriting history.”

  She let the footage run.

  Armor latches snapping. Plate shifting. Blood pouring when he pulled it up. The raw, open look of Jensen’s chest. His own fumbling hands.

  Corin didn’t comment verbally at first. She only occasionally highlighted parts of the wireframe model with a finger, making Aurora’s notes brighten: major vessel damage, lung collapse, suspected heart involvement.

  Kaden forced himself to watch. Forced himself not to look away when Jensen screamed, when his own recorded voice shook, when the sealant hissed over shredded tissue.

  24%

  20%

  17%

  “Pause,” Corin said again, as his past self pressed his whole weight into the patch.

  The image froze with his hands sunk into the gel, fingers slick with blood.

  “Here,” she said. “This is where you did the most good.”

  Kaden frowned. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “You reduced the bleed rate,” she said. “Watch.”

  She trimmed away the rest of the footage, leaving only a graph: HP over time, from impact to cardiac arrest. A ragged downward line. She overlaid a second line in a ghostly blue.

  “This is Aurora’s model if you hadn’t applied any external pressure or sealant,” she said. “No armor removal. No patch. Just waiting for the med team.”

  The blue line plummeted faster. It hit zero a good ten seconds before the real one.

  “You bought him ten seconds,” Corin said. “Maybe fifteen, factoring in respiration.”

  “Doesn’t feel like much,” Kaden muttered.

  “It wasn’t, in this case,” she agreed. “But it’s not nothing. In a different wound profile, ten seconds is the difference between med team reaching you with a viable patient and arriving to tag a body.”

  She flicked a control. A new annotation appeared:

  [INTERVENTION: SEALANT + PRESSURE]

  [ESTIMATED SURVIVAL CHANCE: 4% → 7%]

  Kaden stared at the numbers.

  “Seven,” he said. “That’s still… nothing.”

  “Seven percent isn’t nothing,” Corin said. “Ask anyone who woke up in a sickbay with a hole where their lung used to be.”

  He thought of what Rios had said. Ninety-six percent chance of dying from the moment the shard hit.

  “So you’re saying I couldn’t’ve saved him,” Kaden said. “At all.”

  “I’m saying Jensen was almost certainly going to die,” Corin said. “Not absolutely. Almost. With better training and better tools on your end, you might’ve pushed that seven to ten, maybe twelve. With faster med team response, maybe a little more. There are worlds where he lives. We didn’t get one of those worlds today.”

  He watched the two lines again. The one he’d lived, the one where he’d done nothing.

  “Could I’ve made it worse?” he asked. “If I’d done something wrong?”

  “Yes,” Corin said, without softening it. “If you’d tried to move him. If you’d ripped the entire plate away too fast, without pressure. If you’d used the injector at the wrong moment. You might’ve shaved seconds off what he had left.”

  “So I got lucky,” Kaden said. The word tasted bad.

  “No,” Corin said. “You got some things right and some things wrong. Luck is when the shard hits the wall instead of him. This was you making a decent call with incomplete information.”

  He let out a slow breath. “Feels like luck from here.”

  “That’s your guilt talking,” she said. “Not the System.”

  She shifted in her chair. “Now. You asked what you should’ve done.”

  “Yeah.”

  “First,” she said, “exactly what you did. Get to him. Call for med team. Try to stabilize what you can. That part’s non-negotiable.”

  She tapped the screen. The footage rewound to the moment he reached Jensen and dropped to his knees.

  “Second, you should’ve used your scanner,” she said. “See it? Top right.”

  A small icon pulsed, one he recognized from class. The basic bioscan function they’d used on dummies. He’d never even thought to trigger it in the moment.

  “I was staring at his chest,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at the HUD.”

  “I know,” Corin replied. “That’s common. But the scan would’ve given you a clearer picture of where the worst damage was. You might’ve placed the sealant more efficiently, which would’ve bought a few more seconds, maybe another percent.”

  She ran a simulated overlay showing an “optimal” sealant placement, where the patch covered more of the highest-pressure bleed zones.

  “Third,” she said, “you could’ve prepped the airway. Simple positioning, clearing the mouth. You worried about making the internal damage worse if you moved him. That instinct wasn’t wrong, but you over-weighted it.”

  “And the injector?” he asked.

  “With your current training?” Corin considered. “Fifty-fifty chance you’d have harmed him more than helped. I wouldn’t have expected you to use it correctly in that moment. Not without more drills. That’s on us, not you.”

  He watched the ghost overlay of an alternate sequence: scan, patch, pressure, airway tilt, then med team arriving. The survival line climbed from seven percent to nine.

  Not a miracle. Just a slightly less impossible outcome.

  “You’re not saying any of this to make me feel better,” he said.

  “Correct,” Corin said. “I’m telling you that you did some things right by instinct and some things wrong from lack of knowledge. If you’re ever in a similar situation again, I’d prefer you be ignorant on fewer points.”

  He let that sit for a moment.

  “So what now?” he asked. “For me.”

  Corin flicked her slate. A new panel popped up on the screen: his cadet sheet.

  [AURORA-CADET – STATUS: MERCER, KADEN]

  Level: 1

  Tier: 1

  Current Track: Rifleman

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 4

  COG: 7

  RES: 5

  AP: 5

  “These are your current recorded attributes,” she said. “You know what non-integrated humans have in that AP slot?”

  “Zero,” he said.

  “Correct,” she said. “You’ve got five. That’s enough to power basic active skills when—and if—Aurora grants them. Right now you’ve got none. Rifleman track doesn’t invest early in support augments.”

  “I noticed,” he said.

  “Your cognition’s above average,” she went on. “Your physicality’s serviceable. Agility could be better. Stress resistance is at baseline. Aurora’s log for the incident”, she tapped another control, “notes that your motor control stayed functional under extreme stress.”

  He saw a snippet at the bottom of the screen:

  [LIVE-TRAUMA EVENT: HULK-3B]

  [SUBJECT: MERCER, KADEN]

  [STRESS: HIGH]

  [FUNCTION: MAINTAINED]

  Another line appeared under it, just a little brighter.

  [ADAPTIVE ADJUSTMENT: RES +1]

  [RES: 5 → 6]

  Kaden blinked. His stat panel flickered in the corner of his HUD as Aurora updated it.

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 4

  COG: 7

  RES: 6

  AP: 5

  He stared at the new number. “It just… bumped my RES.”

  “Yes,” Corin said. “Integration’s not static. Aurora watches how you actually behave. Sometimes, when you show it something under real load, it nudges your baselines. Think of it as the System quietly admitting you handled more than it thought you would.”

  “It didn’t feel like handling it,” he said.

  “It rarely does,” she replied. “But the fact you stayed functional while your friend died in front of you? Aurora thinks that’s worth a point.”

  He didn’t know how to feel about that. A reward for not falling apart while Jensen bled out.

  “Doesn’t seem like much,” he said.

  “It’s not,” Corin said. “But it’s real. And it stacks with what you choose to learn next. That’s how most of your growth’ll actually happen. Small shifts. Hard moments.”

  She closed his stat sheet and leaned back a little.

  “You’re not on the medic track,” she said. “You’re not required to be. You could stay Rifleman, pass your evaluations, and go to Andromeda as one more gun. That’s a reasonable path.”

  Kaden looked at the blank screen, seeing Jensen on it anyway.

  “And if I don’t wanna be ‘one more gun’?” he asked quietly.

  She tilted her head. “That’s not a question you answer in this room. My job’s to tell you what happened, not what to do about it.”

  She picked up her slate again. “What I can do is this.”

  A notification popped up in his HUD.

  [NEW CONTENT ASSIGNED]

  [FIELD MEDICINE – INTRO]

  [TRAUMA RESPONSE – LEVEL 1]

  “These were locked to your track before,” Corin said. “I can’t unlock specialization without a formal request, but I can assign you preliminary reading and sims. If you wanna understand more about what happened to Jensen’s chest, you’ve now got that option.”

  He stared at the notification. The names sat there, white text on a blue background, pulsing softly.

  “If I open these,” he said, “does it change anything?”

  “Not today,” Corin said. “Not officially. Aurora’ll log it as self-directed training. If you go on to apply for a specialization change, it may help your case. If you don’t, you’ll still know more next time someone’s screaming under your hands.”

  The way she said “next time” made something cold settle under his ribs.

  He swallowed. “How many times’ve you seen this kind of thing?”

  “Live-fire accidents?” Corin asked. “A few. Combat casualties? A lot.”

  “And how do you stand it?” he asked.

  She considered him for a long moment.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I work. Then I sleep badly. Then I work again. The day I stop caring is the day I ask Aurora to reassign me.”

  It wasn’t comforting. It did feel honest.

  She stood. “We’re done.”

  “That’s it?” he asked, startled.

  “For now,” she said. “There’ll be a general psych evaluation. You’ll say ‘I’m fine,’ and they’ll pretend to believe you, because they’re overworked and you’re functional. I’ve done my part, which is to show you the shape of what happened.”

  She hesitated, then added, “Mercer. You did more than most cadets would’ve. It wasn’t enough. That’s the reality you’ve gotta learn to live in, whatever path you pick. Understand?”

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She moved to the door. It hissed open. He stood slowly.

  “Lieutenant?” he said, as he reached the threshold.

  “Yes?”

  “If I’d known everything in those modules already,” he said, “would it’ve changed…” He trailed off, unable to finish the question.

  “Would Jensen be alive?” she supplied.

  He nodded.

  “No one can answer that honestly,” Corin said. “Not me. Not Aurora. The only thing I can say for sure is this: more knowledge rarely lowers your chances.”

  He let that sit for a second. Then he stepped out into the corridor.

  The door closed behind him with a soft click.

  Aurora’s debrief prompt faded from his HUD, replaced by the small, patient icons of the new modules:

  [FIELD MEDICINE – INTRO]

  [TRAUMA RESPONSE – LEVEL 1]

  [Status: Unopened]

  He walked until the med annex gave way to the busier training corridors, then ducked into a quiet side nook near a maintenance hatch. He sat on the floor, back against cool metal, and finally focused on the icons.

  His thumb twitched against his leg, an old habit. Open. Don’t open. Open.

  He selected Trauma Response – Level 1.

  The module unfolded across his vision. Diagrams. Animated models of chest cavities. Labels: lung, heart, major vessels. Color-coded bleed patterns. A calm voice explaining the difference between survivable trauma and “catastrophic structural compromise.”

  One image looked too much like Jensen’s chest. Not identical. Close enough.

  Something in his throat tried to close up. He hovered over the dismiss icon.

  His hand stayed where it was.

  He forced himself to sit through the first section. Just the first. He listened to the explanations, watched the red spreads, let Aurora’s antiseptic diagrams print over the memory in his own head.

  After a while, a prompt chimed softly.

  [MODULE PROGRESS: TRAUMA RESPONSE – LEVEL 1]

  [Completed: 12%]

  He closed it there, breathing hard.

  The icons stayed in his HUD. No one else could see them. No one else needed to know.

  He pushed himself up, dusted imaginary dirt off his knees, and headed back toward the barracks.

  On the way, his stats hovered briefly in the corner of his vision as if Aurora wanted to remind him who he currently was.

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 4

  COG: 7

  RES: 6

  AP: 5

  Just numbers. Potential, not promise.

  If there was going to be a difference next time, it wouldn’t be because those numbers changed on their own. It’d be because he filled in the blanks Aurora had just drawn for him in red.