This... this was what they meant by Hell Week.
The term wasn't just dramatic flair—it was gospel.
After that grim briefing on the field, everything changed. Whatever we went through before? That was child's play. A twisted little warm-up. What followed was a descent into something closer to madness.
Each day bled into the next, indistinguishable except for the growing ache in our bones and the burning in our lungs. The physical training ramped up with merciless precision. Wake before the first light, run until your legs threatened to give out, fight until you couldn't lift your arms anymore. There were no breaks, no mercy. Just whistle blows and barked orders.
We were pitted against one another, against machines, against the elements themselves. Training fields shifted—sometimes terrain crumbled beneath our feet, other times the air itself warped as if the Shifting was leaking into our drills. You couldn't tell if what you were sweating through was training or a cruel simulation of war.
But just when you thought you'd be allowed to breathe?
Information bombardment.
After dragging our bruised bodies out of the dirt, they threw us into hours-long lectures. Protocols. Tactical formations. Runic thread theory. Field command hierarchy. The list never ended. Eyes glazed over, but you couldn't afford to lose focus—Veiler Handlers would call on anyone at random, and failing to respond correctly meant punishment. No exceptions.
Sleep was a luxury. Meals were rushed. The only thing that remained consistent was the growing sense of being pulled apart and reassembled into something the government could use.
And all the while.
Watching the trio—Silver Hair, Tattoo Girl, Meditating Freak—still managing to look human through it all, as if they'd already endured Hell Week a hundred times over. Watching the other cadets crack under the pressure—one by one, you could see the fire in their eyes die, replaced by numb obedience.
And then there was Seyfe.
If Hell Week was a fire meant to burn the weakness out of cadets, Seyfe was the smoldering coal that refused to go out. Every second of agony, every snapped order, every blood-slicked pushup under a red sky—he endured it. But he didn't go quiet.
No.
In his mind, he was already planning the rebellion.
Every time he was slammed back into the dirt, every time his body screamed to stop, a darker part of him whispered, "One day, I'll burn all this down. Veilers. Squadrons. System. Everything."
But unfortunately, thoughts like that had a way of leaking.
Muttered curses. Whispered oaths. Low growls of hatred spat into the wind.
And somehow, Aki—raven-haired, cold-eyed, and terrifyingly observant—heard every damn word.
Whether she had hypersensitive hearing or just a personal radar for defiance, it didn't matter. What mattered was that Seyfe got punished. Repeatedly. Mercilessly.
Ten times. In just one week.
Sometimes it was public—forced to hold his stance with bloodied knees as Aki lectured the entire squadron about "rogue wolves with no pack." Other times it was subtle—a change in the simulation code that made only his terrain more difficult, his weapons heavier, his targets faster.
But the worst?
The worst was when she didn't say anything at all—just looked at him from across the field, arms crossed, head tilted slightly... and smiled.
That smile haunted him more than any punishment.
Still, he never shut up. Not really.
Because even if Aki caught him ten more times, Seyfe knew silence was the first step toward obedience. And if he had to crawl through punishment after punishment just to keep the fire alive inside him, then so be it.
"I can't wait to knock that girl's ass out once I'm free from this shithole."
The words slipped past Seyfe's teeth like venom. Quiet enough not to draw attention, but sharp enough to feel real. He wasn't even sure who he was talking to—maybe just himself, or maybe the warped version of himself that had been growing louder with every sleepless night.
Aki. That smug, sharp-eyed ghost who haunted his every waking second.
"God knows what I'll do when I finally become an official Veiler."He didn't even bother pretending anymore. It wasn't about proving himself to anyone—it was survival. It was vengeance. It was freedom. And in the back of his mind, he imagined a hundred versions of that moment. Standing in front of her, no longer shackled by the rank of 'cadet,' no longer outmatched. Not under her command, but her equal—or maybe something worse.
But until then, he bit down on every curse, every twitch of his fists. He played their game.Because revenge, like revolution, demanded patience.
And Seyfe was learning patience the hard way.
"Hey, watch out—our rebellious cadet's on the loose!"
The voice came with a smirk, and a flash of ink-covered muscle. Before Seyfe could even brace himself, the tattooed girl came crashing into him like a truck made of adrenaline, swinging wide and hard. He barely had time to register her form before he was airborne—slamming into a cracked stone slab left behind from one of the collapsed wall drills.
The impact sucked the air out of his lungs.
"Fuck... my ribs."
Groaning, he pushed himself halfway up, glaring at the girl who stood with one hand on her hip, spinning her training staff like she was bored of existence itself.
"Out of all the cadets," he muttered under his breath, coughing, "why do I have to be sparring with this goddamn muscle head?"
She grinned like she heard him anyway.
"You're welcome, rebel boy. Consider it a warm-up."Then she winked. "Or a wake-up."
Seyfe swore he saw stars—and not the metaphorical kind.If there was a ranking system for how cursed your week could be, he was sure he just unlocked Platinum Tier Suffering.
This damned muscle girl—Saline. Same age as me, yet somehow my personal demon forged in the fires of hell.
Seyfe stumbled back, clutching his ribs as Saline cracked her knuckles with glee. He managed to drag his eyes across the field, hoping for a glimpse of solidarity, maybe a fellow cadet just as broken as he was.
Nope.
Across the yard, the tall silver-haired boy moved like a reaper among mortals. Cadets swarmed him in a desperate attempt at a takedown, only to be flung aside like rag dolls—some without ever seeing the blow that sent them flying.
Meanwhile, the short silver-haired girl? She bounced from one opponent to the next like a predator playing with her food, giggling as she pounced. Each impact ended with another cadet crumpled into the dirt.
Why am I surrounded by walking corpses and monsters?
He barely had time to finish the thought before—
"Told you to focus, Lady Boy."
Wham.
A blow to the solar plexus. A sharp burst of pain, like lightning detonating in his chest. Seyfe's vision blurred. For a second—just a second—he swore he saw the gate of hell swing open in front of him, flames licking the edge.
He collapsed to his knees, wheezing."...God hates me," he rasped.
Saline just grinned down at him, hands on her hips, radiating unholy joy."C'mon now, that was only my warm-up."
"Consider this my gift for beating up poor outskirt boys like me," Seyfe grunted, raising his middle finger at Saline with a cocky grin half-buried under bruises.
Saline blinked once. Smiled. Then casually reached down, grabbed him by the ankles, and yanked.
"Wait, wait, wai—!"
Thud!
He hit the ground hard, back first. Before he could even gasp for air, she spun him like a ragdoll and launched him into the air.
"You have got to be kidding me—"
His words were stolen by gravity. Saline followed, leapt, and mid-air—slammed him back down with a brutal suplex that shook the training ground.
A collective wince rippled through the cadets nearby.
Seyfe lay flat, staring up at the sky that had started to blur into stars."...I think my soul left my body for a second there."
From somewhere above, Saline's voice came, bright and cheerful."You done being mouthy yet, Lady Boy?"
"I'll let you know... after I stop seeing three of you."
The ragdolling did continue.
By the time it was over, Seyfe looked less like a trainee and more like a bundle of laundry someone angrily threw down a staircase. His entire body ached in ways he didn't know were possible. His ribs protested with every breath, and he was pretty sure his soul had tapped out somewhere around the fourth suplex.
Now, he was half-conscious on a cot in the infirmary, a cooling patch stuck to his cheek and a dull buzzing in his ears.
"You're lucky," one of the medics muttered, checking a scanner. "No stasis this time. Just minor fractures and a possible concussion. You'll live."
"Too bad," Seyfe mumbled, barely able to turn his head. "Stasis chamber's starting to sound like a vacation spot…"
The medic snorted. "You Veilers-in-training are all insane."
"No… just surrounded by monsters."
He could still hear the faint echoes of the trio's laughter outside—Saline's booming chuckle, the silver-haired boy's soft hum as he dismantled opponents without effort, and the short girl's gleeful "Again!" as she bounced into another sparring match like a rabid squirrel with knives.
Seyfe let out a painful sigh."What the hell did I get myself into?"
Seyfe tilted his head slightly, neck stiff as stone, and peeked past the divider of his infirmary cot.
And yeah—he wasn't alone.
Some were in worse shape than he was, which, for once, felt like a twisted badge of honor. He caught sight of a cadet wrapped in bandages from head to toe, breathing through a mask, twitching every now and then like their nerves were still sparring long after their body gave up.
On the cot across from him, a girl quietly whimpered, murmuring "I just wanted to help people…" over and over again like a broken loop.
One corner held a guy gripping a charm necklace with bloodied fingers, muttering so fast it sounded like static."Please—please, whatever god's up there, the moon, the Shift, the Thread, I'll convert, I'll devote, just get me out of here. Get me out. Get me out—"
Seyfe blinked, wide-eyed, the room's flickering blue light casting just enough shadow to make everything feel one breath away from a nightmare.
His eyes swept the room again.Some cadets were limp—barely breathing, barely conscious. The kind of stillness that made your heart skip if you didn't see the rise and fall of a chest.
If he squinted, he could mistake this ward for a morgue.
He flopped back onto his cot, staring at the ceiling.
"Monsters," he whispered. "They're either trying to turn us into one… or see which of us already are."
The fan above him spun lazily. Mocking.
And somewhere beyond the walls, he swore he could still hear Saline laughing.