The first thing Kael noticed was the taste of mud.
It was gritty, foul, and coated the inside of his mouth like a second skin.
The second thing he noticed was that his lungs were currently trying to expel a significant portion of the water.
He rolled onto his side, his body convulsing in a violent fit of coughing.
Water—too much of it—poured from his lips, splashing onto the rocky shore.
His chest burned as if he had swallowed live coals, and every muscle fiber screamed in protest.
'I'm alive,' he thought, the realization bringing him no joy whatsoever.
He was too physically and mentally exhausted to appreciate the fact that he didn't die.
He lay there for a long moment, face pressed against the cold, wet stones, listening to the roar of the waterfall in the distance. It sounded angry. He felt a kinship with it. He, too, was angry.
Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up. His uniform was heavy, waterlogged and clinging to his skin. His boots felt like anchors.
He looked around.
They had washed up on a narrow strip of jagged riverbank. To his left, the river raged on, churning white and deadly. To his right, a wall of green rose up to meet the sky.
The trees were large, their roots twisting like petrified serpents, and the air hung heavy with the smell of rotting vegetation and damp earth.
"Rylen?" Kael croaked. His voice sounded like grinding stones.
A few meters away, a lump of sodden clothes groaned. Rylen was sprawled on his back, staring up at the canopy with wide, unblinking eyes. He looked like a drowned rat, his usual boundless energy completely extinguished.
"I can't feel my legs," Rylen whispered.
"That's because you're lying on a rock," Kael pointed out, his voice raspy.
He scanned the rest of the shore.
A bit further down, Seraphina was dragging herself out of the water.
If Kael looked bad, she looked catastrophic. Her uniform, once pristine, was ripped in multiple areas, blood slowly flowing down her body. Her braid had unraveled, leaving wet strands of hair plastered across her face.
She collapsed onto the sand, gasping for air, clutching her side.
Kael frowned. He did a quick headcount. One, two, three.
"Where's the other guy?"
The question hung in the humid air.
Kael forced himself to stand, swaying slightly. He looked down the river. The current was fast here, violent swirls of white water crashing against jagged rocks.
"Hello!" Rylen shouted, sitting up suddenly, ignoring his pain. "Anyone?"
There was no answer. Only the roar of the water and the distant cry of a jungle bird.
Kael walked to the water's edge, scanning the debris floating downstream.
"He was right behind me" Rylen sighed.
"He's gone," Kael said flatly. Not cruel, just stating the fact. " The current took him."
Rylen looked a bit dispirited, "He was right behind me, I should have held on tighter."
"You would have both drowned," Seraphina's voice cut in.
It was weak, breathless, but it still carried that distinct tone of command. She was using a piece of wood to pull herself upright.
Her left leg wasn't bearing weight properly, and blood was seeping through the tears in her clothes.
She limped toward them, every step clearly agonizing. Kael watched her, expecting her to collapse. But she didn't.
She refused to.
She stopped in front of Kael, swaying slightly.
Her single violet eye, usually sharp and judging, were now clouded with pain, but the fire behind them hadn't gone out.
The three of them stood in a loose triangle, dripping wet, battered, and stranded in the middle of nowhere.
"Status report," Seraphina murmured, though she was looking at the ground.
'Status report?' Kael thought, 'What status?'
And just when he was about to ask, Rylen surprisingly stepped forward, "We have no healer. We have no map. We have no idea where we are, other than 'downstream.'"
"We failed," Rylen muttered, kicking the sand. "The base is gone. The team is gone. We should just fire the flare and quit."
"No."
Seraphina raised her head.
The movement was sharp.
"Look at me," she ordered.
Kael and Rylen looked.
"..."
"You know, I've been observing you two," she said, her voice gaining strength, pushing past the pain in her ribs. "Since the day we got here. I watched everyone."
She locked eyes with them both of them, "And you two where probably the once who contributed the least... in fact you contributed absolutely nothing compared to the others."
"I thought you were worthless," she admitted brutally. "I thought you were the kind of spoiled children who had been spoon-fed your entire live and worry just about yourselves."
Rylen flinched.
Kael just blinked.
'Fair assessment,' he thought not even bothered by the remark.
He had heard worse about him while he was still on earth.
"But I was wrong," Seraphina continued. She took a step closer, her presence seemingly expanding, filling the space between them. "Looking at the way you fought at the end... The energy you both carried and put into the fight, and the fact that you both survived."
She gestured to the jungle around them. "I don't know what is out there. I don't know what awaits us in this Green Hell. But I do know this: We underestimated our enemies. We were arrogant. We split our forces, we ignored defense, and we paid the price in blood."
Her voice dropped an octave, becoming intense, vibrating with a raw emotion that Kael hadn't seen in her before.
"But we still have a chance. A chance to make things right."
She pointed a shaking finger at the Flag still tied to her hand.
"I want you to promise me something. Right here, right now. No matter what happens... no matter what we encounter out here... you will not allow that Flag to leave our grasp. Even if only one of us remains standing at the end, that person will hold that banner. They would have to turn our bodies inside out before we give it up."
She looked at Rylen, then fixed her gaze on Kael.
"Because this isn't about points anymore. It's not about grades. It's about the twenty seven people who stood fought and died so we could escape. They sacrificed themselves so we could be here standing in the mud. And we are going to honor that sacrifice."
"Do you understand?"
The silence that followed was heavy.
Kael looked at her. Really looked at her.
Up until now, Seraphina had to them had looked like those strict, heartless, bossy, aristocratic overachiever who loved the sound of her own voice.
But in this moment, standing broken and bleeding on a riverbank, covered in filth, she didn't look like a student.
She looked like a Commander.
There was a shimmering quality to the air around her—not magic, not mana, but something more primal. It was the weight of Charisma. The kind of aura that made you want to straighten your back. It felt magnetic.
It triggered a memory in Kael's mind. A flicker of a recollection from his previous life on Earth. He remembered watching movies on a flat screen, lying on a couch. He remembered a soldier in blue, carrying a shield with a white star. A man who could stand alone against an army and say, "I can do this all day."
Seraphina had that same look in her eyes. The look of someone who would plant their feet and refuse to move, even if the world itself tried to push them over.
'Wow,' Kael thought, his internal cynicism faltering for the first time.
She actually believed they could still make it.
She believed it so much that she was making him believe it.
It was annoying.
It was inspiring.
He felt a strange sensation in his chest.
It wasn't heartburn.
It wasn't the water he'd swallowed.
It was... respect?
He glanced at Rylen.
The Knight had stopped shivering.
The smile was also no where to be seen.
The despair was gone, replaced by a steely resolve.
Seraphina's words had acted like a healing spell on his morale.
They turned back to Seraphina.
Kael sighed, scratching the back of his head.
He really didn't like it when people turned to rely or put their expectations on him, because he would one hundred percent disappoint them, but at this moment there was nothing he could do to escape this.
Seraphina was right, they couldn't lose their morale now.
He needed to get his act together or he might wake up tomorrow with a missing arm.
He met Seraphina's gaze.
He didn't slouch.
For the first time since arriving here, he stood at his full height.
"Understood," Kael said.
"Understood," Rylen echoed, his voice firm.
Seraphina held their gazes for a second longer, then nodded.
A small, pained smile touched her lips.
"Good," she whispered. "Then let's go. We have a game to finish."
She turned toward the dense, foreboding wall of the jungle. Kael and Rylen flanked her, the Flag tightly tied around her arm.