Page 13 of Accidentally Fearless

The fact that he was tracking my eating habits should have been strange. It wasn't. When was the last time someone at Battlezone had noticed whether I'd had lunch?

"I'll walk with you to the commissary," he said. "There are aspects of the honor code you may find useful to discuss."

It wasn't subtle. I was learning that subtlety wasn't in the Velkorin toolkit. He wanted to talk to me. He was engineering an excuse.

We walked. The corridors were built for Velkorin proportions, which meant I felt like a child in a very fancy office building. Vrex shortened his stride to match mine without being asked—either cultural courtesy or evidence that he'd calculated my stride length. Honestly, it was a toss-up.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You may ask anything."

"Why seven strategists? Before me. You hired seven professional military strategists, and none of them worked. What went wrong?"

He considered this for a longer time than the question required. "They were all trained in traditional Velkorin military doctrine. They approached the problem with the same framework I had—the same framework the honor code was built to accommodate. Different personnel. Identical methodology."

"So you kept hiring the same person in different packaging."

"An accurate assessment."

"And then you hired me."

"The Bureau hired you. I hired a 'Supreme Leader of Recreational Combat.' The distinction is relevant."

"Is it? Because from where I'm standing, you got exactly what you needed—someone who'd never read a Velkorin tactics manual and therefore couldn't be trapped by it."

He stopped walking and turned to look at me. The corridor was quiet. The amber light caught his scales, and there it was again. That expression I'd noticed in the war room. Not surprise. Not evaluation. Something more personal. The look of a man recalculating someone he'd written off.

"You are good at this," he said quietly.

The words surprised me. It wasn't my ego, where compliments usually deflected. It was deeper. Somewhere I'd closed off years ago because it hurt too much to keep hoping someone would notice.

"Yeah," I said. "I really am."

He held my gaze for another beat. The bioluminescent lines on his forearms pulsed once—warm amber. It was the color I was starting to associate with moments where his control slipped.

Then he resumed walking, and we spent the rest of the corridor discussing honor code loopholes, ignoring the quiet, unnamed connection that grew in the space between us.

The next three days were a blur of training sessions, honor code revisions, and discovering that Velkorin coffee—if you could call it coffee—was essentially jet fuel filtered through volcanic rock. I drank it anyway, because sleep was a luxury I couldn't afford and the alternative was face-planting into a holographic tactical display.

I ran drills like I ran paintball tournaments. I had zero tolerance for "but we've always done it this way."

The first session was a disaster. I stood on the training ground—a flat expanse of packed earth surrounded by modular obstacles, and attempted to teach thirty Velkorin warriors the concept of "fluid formation adjustment."

"Okay," I said, pointing at the three-warrior team I was using as a demonstration unit. "You're advancing in a line. Standard approach. Enemy contact, right flank. What do you do?"

"Wheel right to engage," the team leader said. Standard doctrine.

"Nope. You're predictable. Krenix knows you'll wheel right because your manual says wheel right. Instead—" I grabbed the team leader's arm and physically repositioned him, which required reaching up to his elbow. "You collapse. Pull back to cover. Let the enemy commit to where you were, and then re-engage from a position they didn't expect."

"That is... retreating."

"It's repositioning. There's a difference."

"It appears identical to retreating."

"Does it work?"

Silence.