On the surface, the war had hardened into a bloody, grinding stalemate.
The Federation’s official news feeds were piped into the common areas—streams of heroic victories, inspirational speeches, and carefully edited footage of “unyielding spirit.”
Jack—the only one among them who actually knew what the battlefield smelled like, that mix of hot blood and burning metal and ozone—said nothing.
He knew all too well that “a phase victory” was just a polite way of saying:
We are slowly losing our last pair of underwear.
The Draconian Imperium was a nation forged in war.
The Terran Federation was a nation that had forgotten what war was.
This was going to be long. And ugly.
The memory of that suffocating presence of death on the front line kept chewing on his thoughts. So he started chewing back on data. On everything he could get his hands on.
His study list became a weird cocktail of genius and corruption:
- Applied Mech Tactics: Case Studies from Live Combat — Jack only read the “Defeat Scenarios” chapter, obsessively studying all the ways people died.
- War Psychology: A Mathematical Model of Fear — formulas for using low-probability events to trigger large-scale feedback loops of mass panic.
- Sub-Neuronal Reflex Drills: How to Make Your Fingers Outrun Your Brain — all about running faster, reacting faster.
- Advanced Thruster Modification: An Unofficial Field Guide to Illegal Overclocking
- …and so on.
He threw himself into all of it with desperate, almost pathological fervor.
He used the gravity labs to practice close-quarters combat and mech maneuvering until his hands shook too badly to hold a wrench, until every muscle in his body trembled in protest.
Nova called it masochism.
Jack just wore that dumb, harmless grin.
No one understood that every time he learned a new dirty trick, every time he absorbed another piece of forbidden knowledge, he felt the “X” Crowley had drawn over his name in some black grimoire fade just a little.
And then his strange, all-devouring training regimen was abruptly interrupted.
Dr. Thorne’s life’s work was reaching its final stage: a military project built on hyperreal simulation.
It wasn’t just a war game.
It was a universe built on almost 100% real data.
As one of the core engineers on the simulation pods and hardware integration team, Jack was hooked. Captivated.
The system’s code name was The Crucible.
Its power didn’t come from a traditional supercomputer, but from the Janus Quantum Mainframe.
It didn’t “mirror reality” like some child’s toy.
Instead, it used its quantum advantage to perform probability simulations.
It devoured billions of live data points from a dense network of micro-sensors scattered across all of Prime World Epsilon’s key strategic zones, and from that it built a digital twin of the planet.
Then Janus would spin that twin forward, computing a billion of the most probable futures for any given situation—
and collapse them into a single, hyperreal simulated reality.
The data streams were not infinite.
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The micro-sensors had limited power and transmitted on pulsed intervals. That introduced a subtle but exploitable fog of war into what should have been a perfect system.
The immersion stack ran deep. Neural conduction gel and brainwave resonance crystal chips did most of the heavy lifting, coupling with the brain’s collective neuronal firing to generate EM pulses through a stacked-space wave equation:
S(t) = ε × C(t) × cos(ω_brain × t)
That signal then fed into a centuries-old resonance amplification principle from Tesla:
d2Φ/dt2 + γ(dΦ/dt) + Ω?2Φ = S(t)
Together, they reproduced vision, hearing, and motor control almost perfectly by driving tiny differences in brainwave oscillation modes.
Other senses—pain, smell—were abstracted.
Damage was modeled as spikes in the neural-delta data.
Smell became parameterized fluctuations in simulated gas-particle distributions inside the code.
On the one-year anniversary of the war, The Crucible went live.
It linked together the three major military academies in the system and a huge chunk of active-duty personnel.
Every would-be hero wanted to prove themselves here.
Everyone—except the trickster called Loki.
Jack’s grin was so wide his cheeks physically hurt.
“What the hell was that?!”
“Cheating! That’s gotta be cheating! Where are the admins?!”
“I’m going to kill him! I swear I’ll find this ID in real life and shove his head into a thruster intake!”
The public observation room for The Crucible was on the brink of mutiny. The curses alone could’ve peeled the paint off the walls.
Jack slouched back in his sim pod and even had the mood to whistle.
The main screen was replaying his most recent “despicable” win.
His opponent had been an A-rank “Warhound” special forces ace in a heavy assault mech—
a suit that should’ve crushed Jack like an ant.
But the ace was now nothing but a smear of corrupted data.
The match had lasted three minutes.
Jack, piloting the lightest recon mech, had bolted like a terrified rabbit, luring the blood-mad Warhound into a narrow canyon.
He was exploiting something almost no one else knew: a low-refresh dead zone.
Because of terrain occlusion, the micro-sensors in that canyon experienced a 0.03-second delay in data transmission.
In that tiny pocket, the Janus probability engine couldn’t perfectly predict rockslides and collapsing ledges.
But Jack could.
At the cliff’s edge, he didn’t brake. He jumped.
The Warhound followed, grinning, ready to blast him out of the sky.
And then—
A patrolling unmanned bomber, a Nightshade Fighter, burst from the clouds.
Under normal conditions, its planned flight path should’ve crossed that spot two seconds later.
But because of that 0.03-second latency, the system misidentified the Warhound’s fast-moving mech as an incoming enemy missile.
FOOM.
No glorious duel.
Just merciless anti-air coverage from his own side.
The ace never even saw Jack’s shadow.
He was vaporized by friendly fire before he had time to be angry.
Winner: Loki.
In less than a week, that ID had become a legend—or more accurately, a curse—inside The Crucible.
“Hundreds of wins. Not a single one from a fair shootout!”
“He’s a ghost! Last time I locked onto his heat trace, it turned out he’d dumped reactor coolant into the sewers to fake a signature! He was hiding in a trash compactor and blew the methane when I walked by!”
For Jack, The Crucible was paradise.
Here, there was no honor. Only victory.
He could unleash all the weird shit his brain was built for: exploiting human greed, gaming system bugs, and the bone-deep survival reflex coded into those Martian-mod genes.
Every match was another entry in his ongoing Exhibition of Dishonorable Arts.
He was still savoring the taste of that last “borrowed knife” kill when the sim pod hissed open behind him.
“So,” a cold, familiar voice said above his head, “you’re the legendary ‘Loki.’”
Jack slowly lifted the neural helmet off his head. He looked up, and his heart thudded hard enough to hurt.
Nya.
She was standing there in a brand-new flight suit, the witch emblem on her sleeve marking her as a special operations air corps. Her eyes—sharp and predatory—were fixed right on him.
Jack swallowed and tried to force a harmless smile onto his face.
“Uh… if I say I’m here to fix the plumbing, would you believe me?”
That night, in the lab’s common lounge, the entertainment feed was abruptly cut.
The screen went black.
Then the image resolved into something solemn and heavy:
The War Year One Memorial Wall.
Names flowed down the glowing surface like rivers of blood.
Each name had once been a living, breathing human.
Now, they were a handful of bytes scrolling down a display.
Above the river of names gleamed the motto of the Terran Federation:
“For Honor, For Sacrifice, For Victory.”
Jack’s reflection hovered over the glass, overlapping with the dead.
He stared at that massive word—HONOR—and a twisted, bitter half-smile tugged at his mouth.
STARK-2 blinked on his wrist:
[Host heart rate abnormal. Recommendation: deep breathing.]
For honor, my ass, Jack thought.
Thirteen escapes. Thirteen brushes with death.
If he’d chosen “honor” back then, his name would’ve been on that wall thirteen times over.
The engravers would be complaining that he took up too much space.
He turned away from the glowing death roll, sat back down, and pulled the neural helmet over his head again.
In a world this fake, with slogans and edited footage and memorial walls pretending to mean something—
Only that bug-riddled, slaughter-filled battlefield inside The Crucible felt remotely real.
Loki: online.
The next dirty performance was about to begin.
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