Chapter 9 – Culling Grounds
[Clip from the Outer Systems: Border War Log #2217 Location: Luyten-β Forward Post, Verge of Dominion-held Space
> "We lost three carriers in twenty minutes. They came out of the asteroid field with stealth frigates and plasma-laced boarding pods. We didn't even have time to scream. I don't know what they are, but they move like wraiths in the dark. The Dominion isn't sending their main fleet. These are hounds… bred for one thing: the hunt."
– Lieutenant P. Hessing, 9th Orbital Corps, final transmission.]
---
Mars Naval Academy – Five Days Later
Drills had become war.
Kale Drayen lay flat in the mud, one eye swollen from a well-placed boot, lungs burning as if someone had set a fire in his chest. All around him, cadets were screaming, clawing, shoving, bleeding. This wasn't a simulation. It wasn't some cleverly coded combat program with safety locks.
It was the Culling.
"Get. Up." The voice was cold steel. Instructor Kade loomed over him, gauntlets dripping with blood—not simulated, not staged. Real blood. "You've got two minutes before the drones sweep through. If you're still here when they do, you're dead."
Drayen spat mud, rolled onto his knees, and pushed up with a grunt. His left leg was useless—he'd taken a stun round to the thigh. But his mind was already racing, calculating.
The field was a kill zone. Automated drones would begin their sweep from the north. The south led to the extraction point—but that meant crossing a ravine filled with barbed coils and shock mines.
No cadet was expected to survive this alone.
---
Kora crouched beside Ox behind a crumbling rock formation, her rifle aimed toward the tree line. "Where the hell is Kale?"
"Dead if he doesn't show up in the next five minutes," Ox growled. "And I'm not dragging his ass this time."
"You will," she said quietly.
Sure enough, seconds later, a figure stumbled out of the brush, limping but alive. Drayen dropped beside them and barked, "We're going to use the drone sweep against them."
Kora blinked. "Them who?"
"The elites," Kale rasped, pointing toward the ridge where Cassian Dorne's team had camped. "They're blocking the south. But if we redirect the drones… make them look like targets…"
"Wait—you want to draw the drones into a live cadet zone?"
"They won't kill them. Just stun. Painfully. Enough for us to slip by while they're getting fried."
Ox grinned. "You're a bastard."
Kale smiled through a busted lip. "Takes one to survive this place."
---
POV Switch: Cassian Dorne
"Positions!" Cassian barked, his voice as smooth as silk yet sharp as shattered glass. He was the kind of cadet whose posture never faltered, even under fire. The kind born into command.
His team held the high ground. They had food, a functioning drone scrambler, and the best defensive spot in the simulation zone.
"This is how the weak are culled," he murmured, watching the lower valley through his scope.
Then he heard it—the high-pitched whine of drones breaking formation.
"What the hell…?" His second-in-command, Vana Loric, frowned.
Cassian's eyes widened as he saw the drone squadron curve mid-flight, break left, and begin to descend—toward them.
"They hacked the signal. They hacked the damn drones."
---
Back below, Kale's group sprinted across the ravine, using the confusion as cover. The traps still snapped at their boots, but Kora's grenades detonated just enough of a path for Ox to carry Kale the rest of the way.
By the time the instructors called the simulation off, Cassian's team was scattered, bruised, and blinking in disbelief. Dorne himself sat slumped against a tree, seething.
Instructor Kade walked past him with a smirk. "Looks like the street rat from Sector 9 just outplayed High Tower's finest."
---
Later That Night – Infirmary
"Why didn't you leave me?" Kale asked.
Kora didn't look up from cleaning her gear. "You don't leave your Commander."
Ox chuckled. "You're not our Commander yet."
Kale didn't answer. He just stared at the flickering ceiling lights. "Give it time."
---
The war drums of the Academy no longer beat in whispers.
They roared.
It began at zero-six hundred hours, without warning, without flair. The Academy's central command tower activated emergency drills across every sector. The sky above the Martian plains turned crimson with warning lights, a mechanical dawn breaking across the horizon. Sirens screamed across the dormitories and training blocks. Doors hissed open with violent urgency.
Kale Drayen was already up.
He had been awake since four, seated at the edge of his bunk in silence. The room was dark but not to him. He had memorized every creak of his floorboard, every faint flicker of the wall monitor when it entered standby. It was a comfort, in its way. Predictable. Grounded.
Lie Cadence stirred awake to the sound of boots hitting the floor.
"They starting another drill this early?" she mumbled, rubbing her eyes.
"No notice this time," Kale replied calmly. "Feels like a culling." He grabbed his combat rig and slid it on with practiced ease.
The culling. When the weak were filtered out. Only the best advanced.
Lie blinked at him. "But we haven't even hit the third rotation. Isn't it early for—"
"They're changing the rules. We either keep up, or we die out."
By the time they made it to the Assembly Yard, a hundred cadets had already arrived, some still in partial uniform, others grim-faced and ready. The instructors stood on a high platform, flanked by armed guards, which was unusual.
Cassian Dorne appeared shortly after them, pristine as always in his black and gold uniform, hair combed back, expression unreadable.
"Figures the peacock's always camera ready," Lie muttered.
Kale didn't respond.
Commander Vorn stepped forward. His voice cut through the noise like a guillotine.
"Today, we will determine who commands, and who obeys. Who flies, and who dies."
The silence was complete.
"Simulation Wing Delta," he continued. "Each cadet will take command of a naval ship in a simulated battlefield. Real-time combat, no safeties. If you lose control of your ship, you're done. If you retreat, you're done. If your fleet loses because of you, you're done."
Gasps broke out.
"Victory," Vorn said, "is earned. Not given."
---
The Simulation Wing was an underground chamber, cavernous and cold. The cadets were split into teams of ten. Each team was assigned a fleet formation with command hierarchies. Kale found himself at the bottom rank of the Blue team. Lowest position. No command.
"They really like pissing on the new blood," Lie muttered beside him.
"Good," Kale replied. "They won't see it coming."
Team Red was headed by Cassian Dorne. Naturally. His team was stacked—sons and daughters of admirals, high-blood tacticians, corporate elite progeny.
The scenario was loaded: planetary blockade, enemy reinforcements inbound in twenty simulated minutes. Objectives: maintain the blockade, destroy enemy supply lines, minimize losses.
When the sim started, Kale said nothing.
His fleet commander—a bulky cadet named Renzo Callen—began barking orders.
"Frigates to the flanks, cruisers form a spearhead. Cut through the center. We rush 'em before their backup lands."
It was a brute force plan. Kale frowned.
It would lose them the game in less than ten minutes.
But he stayed silent. He needed one thing: control.
Five minutes in, Red Team adapted. Dorne executed a feint—pulling their supply vessels into a mock retreat while a destroyer squadron crept along the outer belt, aiming for a pincer strike.
Blue didn't see it.
But Kale did.
"They're baiting the center. Our flanks will collapse in two minutes if they breach that asteroid line," he said.
Renzo laughed. "You're the bottom rung. Sit down and stay quiet."
Kale smiled.
Two minutes later, the flank collapsed.
Chaos.
The Blue Commander panicked. Cadets shouted. The simulation registered three frigates destroyed, two more disabled. Kale moved.
Without authorization, he rerouted the comms grid and rebalanced shield frequencies on two remaining cruisers.
Lie blinked. "What are you—"
"Buying us time," he said, voice cold.
"Kale, if they catch you—"
"Then I'll make sure it's after I win."
He initiated a subroutine from his console, masked under the main command feed. He took remote control of a damaged corvette, sending it on a collision course with the incoming destroyers, activating its warp drive just before impact.
It exploded. A simulated pulse tore through the pincer formation.
Dorne's formation wavered.
Kale seized the opening.
He opened fleet comms.
"This is Cadet Kale Drayen. Call off your retreat. Redirect power to engines, reverse flank rotation by 17 degrees. Draw them in. Let them taste the kill."
Some hesitated.
Then Lie Cadence moved. "I'm with him. I see it."
Others followed.
Within minutes, the tide shifted. Kale's maneuver baited the enemy into a chokepoint, then collapsed the corridor with two well-timed plasma mine detonations. The Red Team's supply lines were incinerated.
Cassian Dorne's ship was the last one standing.
They faced off, one-on-one.
Cassian hailed him. "You're not like the rest."
Kale grinned.
"You should've killed me when I was no one."
The last salvo hit. Red went dark.
Simulation complete.
Kale sat back in his chair, pulse steady.
Instructor Vorn's voice echoed overhead.
"Team Blue, victory. Cadet Kale Drayen is now promoted to Fleet Cadet Commander. Effective immediately."
Silence. Then scattered applause.
Dorne stared at the display. His jaw clenched.
Lie chuckled beside Kale. "You just made the list."
Kale didn't smile.
He didn't need to.
---
[Thoughts of Kale Drayen:
Victory comes not from strength, but from the ability to predict the opponent's heartbeat. Dorne thought three moves ahead. I thought six. He led from pride. I led from hunger.
In war, the enemy expects aggression. So I give them hesitation. They expect retreat. So I offer fury. They expect a soldier. I become a shadow.]
---
Quote of the Chapter:
["In war, the greatest victories are won not with swords, but with the mind. The battlefield is a chessboard, and every piece a soul." — General Sun Tzu.]