Chapter 14: Trial by Fire
The clearing outside Ironwood — the squad's newly assigned outpost, little more than a converted watchtower and a scatter of repurposed barracks — was quiet in the way clearings only got right before someone was about to make a great deal of noise in them.
"Alright." Gamma stood at the center of it, arms crossed, addressing four soldiers who had known each other for less than a full day. "Before I take any of you anywhere near a real fight, I need to know what you actually do, not what your file says you do. So we're doing this the simple way."
William raised a hand, already smirking. "Define simple."
"You're going to try to hit me. All four of you, together, whatever plan you can put together in the next thirty seconds. I'm not going to make it easy, and I'm not going to hold back enough that it feels like charity."
Gobby's ears drooped slightly. "That sounds like a bad time for us specifically."
"That's the point."
Kenta moved first, and moved well — no wasted motion, a blade drawn and closing distance before Gamma had fully finished his sentence, aimed with the kind of precision that suggested years of actual fieldwork rather than academy drilling.
The blade caught Gamma's forearm plating dead center.
And shattered.
Kenta didn't flinch at the loss, already retreating a step, reassessing with the same flat calm he'd worn walking through the door that morning. "Armor's harder than anything I've cut before."
"Noted. You adjust fast. That's worth more than the blade."
Gobby came next, less subtle about it, driving forward with a heavy weapon-swing Gamma sidestepped without much effort — but the goblin recovered faster than his size suggested he should, adjusting his angle on the follow-through toward a gap in the plating at Gamma's shoulder joint that even Gamma had to admit was a genuinely well-spotted weakness.
"Good eye," Gamma said, catching the strike on his gauntlet before it landed. "Wrong angle. Try lower next time."
"Noted!" Gobby said, sounding entirely too delighted to have been complimented mid-attack.
Org didn't bother with finesse at all. He simply closed the distance and swung the mace in a single, committed arc that Gamma caught on a raised forearm, absorbing the impact with a grunt of genuine effort — the first hit all morning that had actually registered as more than a formality.
"That one I felt," Gamma admitted.
"Org hit hard," Org said, with the flat satisfaction of a man confirming something everyone already knew.
It was William who finally found the gap the others hadn't.
While Gamma's attention split between Org's mace and Kenta circling for a second attempt, a glow bloomed at William's palm, runes catching the morning light.
"Ignis Lancia."
The spear of flame caught Gamma square in the chest — and this time, his HUD didn't log a temperature spike and move on. Warning indicators bloomed red across his visor as his suit's systems stuttered, power flickering, servo response lagging by a fraction of a second that felt, in the moment, considerably larger than it was.
He staggered, catching himself against one knee, armor hissing as it fought to reboot the affected systems.
Silence fell over the clearing.
"...Huh," William said, sounding genuinely startled by his own success. "That actually worked."
Gamma straightened slowly, systems flickering back online, and looked at the mage with something that wasn't quite approval and wasn't quite alarm either.
"That's the first hit today that would've actually mattered in a real fight." He rolled the affected shoulder experimentally. "Good work. All of you. That's exactly what I needed to see."
"Wait," Gobby said, blinking. "We passed?"
"You found real weaknesses in under ten minutes against someone who just leveled a castle. Yeah. You passed."
By the time they made it back into Ironwood proper, the sun had dipped low enough to paint the outpost's weathered walls a deep orange, and the whole squad had the loose, slightly giddy exhaustion of people who'd just survived something they hadn't been entirely sure they would.
Rie was waiting for them at the mess hall door, and from the smell alone, Gamma could tell she'd been busy.
"I used some of the emergency gold," she announced, before anyone could ask, with the particular defiant cheer of someone bracing for an argument she'd already decided to win. "Figured if we're going to be a team, we should actually eat like one at least once before everything gets complicated."
The table she'd laid out was modest by any court standard — roasted meat, flatbread, some kind of spiced root stew that smelled considerably better than the mess hall's usual fare had any right to — but it landed, in the moment, like something closer to a feast.
"You," William said, sliding into a seat with theatrical gratitude, "are officially my favorite member of this squad."
"I'm not even in the squad."
"Details."
Gobby ducked into a seat that groaned audibly under his weight, already reaching for the bread with an eagerness that suggested he hadn't eaten a proper meal in longer than he'd let on. Kenta took his portion quietly, murmuring something that might have been thanks. Org settled cross-legged on the floor rather than trust a bench, mace laid carefully across his knees, and ate with the same unhurried focus he brought to everything else.
Gamma lowered himself onto the bench at the table's head, helmet still off from the training session, and found four sets of eyes — five, counting Rie's — settling on him with an ease that hadn't existed twelve hours earlier.
"To the squad," Rie said, raising a cup of watered wine with entirely too much ceremony for the occasion. "May we not immediately die."
"Low bar," William said, raising his own cup anyway.
"Realistic bar," Kenta corrected.
Gamma looked around the table — at soldiers the Council had called rejects, gathered around a meal a demon empire's coin had technically paid for, laughing at jokes that would have meant nothing to any of them a day ago — and found, somewhere underneath the tactical assessment he couldn't quite turn off, something that felt uncomfortably close to warmth.
He didn't examine it too closely. Old habit.
But he let it sit there anyway, for now, and ate.