Une équipe SEAL a envoyé une recrue dans la zone morte pour un test — mais elle en est ressortie seule. La porte en acier a explosé avec un fracas qui a coupé le souffle à tous les hommes présents dans la salle de contrôle.

It was instructional—a message that she had observed their weaknesses, catalogued their predictable entry points and obsolete encryption, and left them exposed.

Dalia finally cornered Astra near the water dispenser, her face closed, her voice a low venomous whisper.

“Listen, Kepler,” she said. “This isn’t about being better. This is about being one of us. We know you’re a ghost—a file with no history. If you keep this up, refusing to break, refusing to even pretend you’re human, you won’t just fail. We’ll make sure your records are completely scrubbed. You’ll be a non-person. Is it worth it, princess?”

It was a pure, naked threat of professional annihilation.

Astra paused mid-drink, her eyes meeting Dalia’s over the rim of the cup.

She took a slow sip. Swallowed. Set the cup down.

“Non-persons cannot be scrubbed,” she said quietly. “My existence is quantified, not dependent on your database integrity.”

The answer was a cold reminder that her clearance level was likely higher than Dalia’s entire team combined—that her history was stored in systems Dalia couldn’t even name.

The decision to send Astra into the dead zone wasn’t made out of strategic testing.

It was made out of sheer, petty exhaustion.

Rook gathered Bravo 9 in the ready room, five doors closed, the air heavy with sweat, coffee, and resentment.

She won’t break under pressure, he admitted to himself. She won’t fail physically. They’d tried everything.

“We’re left with one option,” he said aloud, his voice heavy. “The environment. The zone is random. It’s chaotic. And it doesn’t care about clearance codes. It’s the only truly unbiased judge left.”

He didn’t look at Norah Quinn, the quiet tech who ran the ranges, already protesting in the corner.

His eyes scanned the hardened faces of his team, appealing to their shared sense of injury.

“We need confirmation that this anomaly cannot survive a truly unfair fight,” he said. “We need a definitive result. No blood, no body, no closure. Just a clean disappearance from the roster.”

Then came the morning he decided to end it.

He laid an old paper map on the table.

“Dead zone starts at oh-six-hundred,” he said. “Fifteen minutes, solo. You come out breathing, Kepler, you stay on the team. You don’t…” He shrugged. “The rest writes itself.”

Merrick grinned, waving a crumpled twenty.

“Bet she doesn’t make four,” he said.

Dalia was already tapping on her tablet, fingers flying.

“Commander,” Norah said softly, stepping out of the shadows. “Dead zone’s red-flagged for live ordnance this month.”

Norah Quinn’s voice shook slightly.

“The red flag isn’t just ordnance,” she said. “It’s non-standard chemical agent residue from the last exercise. Containment measures are incomplete. Fifteen minutes exposure could mean organ damage—even if she bypasses the traps.”

Her voice was low and urgent, laced with genuine fear.

Rook’s eyes were already clouded by fixation.

“Your job, Quinn, is to monitor the feed,” he snapped. “Not critique mission parameters. I’m giving her an opportunity to prove herself against the purest test of survival we have. Stand down.”

Norah retreated, but not before her fingers flew across her console, quietly enabling a secondary, non–Bravo 9–controlled monitoring feed.

A quiet act of insubordination she knew could cost her everything.

Rook cut her off with a final, brutal line:

“Even better,” he said. “Clears the roster faster.”

They handed Astra a map with half the legend scratched out, a flashlight missing its batteries, and a radio they knew wouldn’t reach past the first ridge.

Merrick clapped her on the shoulder hard enough to stagger most guys.

“Good luck, princess,” he said. “Try not to trip over your own feet.”

He had one more move planned.

During gear issue, he palmed a specially weighted lead disc. Under the guise of that “encouraging” clap, he slipped it into the single outer pocket of her cargo pants.

The extra half pound was negligible—impossible to notice against the weight of a knife and field kit—but it was engineered to subtly shift her center of gravity, just enough to throw off balance during a dynamic jump or fast corner.

It was his signature brand of sabotage: petty, invisible, potentially fatal.

Astra didn’t react.

But as she reached the steel door, she slipped a hand into the pocket, extracted the disc between thumb and forefinger, and without breaking stride, flicked it off the narrow pathway into the dense scrub.

It landed with a soft thud.

Exactly where the first pressure-plate mine was hidden.

Merrick’s smirk died on his face.

Astra looked at his hand still hovering near her shoulder until he pulled it back.

Then she nodded once, turned, and walked toward the gate.

The heavy steel door clanged shut behind her.

The control room descended into a toxic, expectant silence.

Bravo 9 huddled around the monitors, pretending to sip their coffee casually, but their eyes were wired to the black-and-white feeds.

The air was thick with silent betting—not on if she’d fail, but how fast and how spectacularly.

Dalia wasn’t just dialing up sensitivity on the traps.

She was actively running a predictive failure model on her tablet, inputting Astra’s movement speed and trap density.

The model kept spitting out an impossibility: 99.99% survival probability if her speed was maintained.

She kept refreshing the inputs, convinced the algorithm was flawed—that it didn’t understand the physical reality of the kill zone.

The system was telling her the truth.

Her ego insisted it was lying.

On-screen, inside the zone, Astra moved like the air was thicker for everyone except her.

The first plate mine waited just past the threshold.

A standard candidate would step, feel nothing, and die a heartbeat later.

Astra heard the click before her boot settled.

She dropped to a knee, untied one bootlace, looped it around a branch, slid the branch under her foot to hold pressure, then pulled her boot free.

Smooth. No detonation.

The mine stayed silent under the branch.

One of the camera feeds glitched for half a second.

Dalia cursed under her breath.

Next came the punji pit—hidden under loose pine needles, reinforced so the perimeter lip wouldn’t give a warning crunch. It was designed to catch a recruit mid-stride and turn a misstep into a catastrophic fall.

Astra didn’t just tap the ground once.

Moving with a silent, gliding pace, she used the flat of her knife to perform a rapid series of tiny percussive taps, listening to the subtle differences in acoustic resonance across the forest floor.

The hollow thud beneath one patch of needles wasn’t just empty space—it gave her the precise boundary of the reinforced frame.

Instead of a long, dramatic leap, she executed an explosive vertical bound that cleared the pit entirely and landed in a feather-light roll, absorbing all kinetic energy.

Her boots barely disturbed the pine needles.

From the ground-level camera, the movement looked impossible—a dancer’s grace married to a spider’s understanding of structural physics.

Merrick’s twenty stayed in his hand.

They watched her spot the monofilament line not with her eyes, but with the way the morning light shifted wrong in a cluster of spiderwebs.

La corde, haute comme une cheville et quasiment invisible, était tendue en travers d’un passage étroit et reliée à une grenade assourdissante – un piège classique.

Astra sortit de sa poche une petite pince à cheveux en métal.

Elle a actionné la gâchette du détonateur, a remis la goupille en position SÉCURITÉ sans un bruit, puis a continué.

Plus tard, en visionnant la vidéo image par image, Dalia verrait ce qu’elle avait manqué en temps réel.

Astra avait également utilisé un court morceau de fil de fer récupéré, coupé avec précision, identique à celui qu’elle avait utilisé pour son gilet pare-balles. Au lieu de désamorcer complètement la grenade, elle plia délicatement le levier de sécurité, juste assez pour créer un léger jeu, suffisant pour pouvoir enjamber le fil sans en modifier la tension.

Elle n’avait pas seulement désactivé le piège.

Elle avait manipulé ses tolérances.