The flawless victory in the Urban Extraction was a double-edged sword. It seeded them in a high bracket for the Gauntlet, yes. But it also painted the largest possible target on their backs. Overnight, "Team Obsidian" and "the white-haired void-pilot" became the talking points of the championship. Their every move in the following days' individual events was dissected by rival teams and Federation analysts alike.
Ryosuke competed in the Solo Mech Duel exhibition. His opponent was a prodigy from the Martian Mechanicum Institute, piloting a sleek, custom Scout-Class mech equipped with gravity-manipulating weapons. The fight lasted ninety seconds. Ryosuke didn't land a single physical blow. He used micro-pulses of Blue and Red to disrupt his opponent's footing and aim, herding the scout-mech into a pre-placed capture-net trap. It was a masterclass in control and humiliation. The Martian pilot was left screaming in frustration in a tangled heap of metal and cables.
The victory was decisive, but the method was debated. Was it brilliant tactics or cruel psychological warfare? The lines blurred.
The individual events were a gauntlet in themselves, designed to whittle down the competition. Sera excelled in the Precision Energy Projection trials, her new control allowing her to etch a perfect Federation insignia into a slab of starship armor from a kilometer away. Chen shattered records in the Obstacle Reaction Course, his speed-of-thought processing making the holographic hazards seem to move in slow motion. Varg dominated the Structural Stress-Testing (essentially, a "hit things until they break" competition), his augmented fists shattering reinforced concrete pillars with terrifying ease. Aris, in the Telekinetic Endurance event, held a one-ton weight aloft for twice as long as any other competitor, his face a mask of serene focus.
Their successes were meteoric, but the pressure was an invisible vice tightening around them all. They were no longer fighting for themselves, or even just for the academy. They were fighting to prove a concept—that a team of "misfit" awakenings, built around an enigma, could be the future.
The strain showed in different ways. Sera became quieter, her hands constantly moving as if practicing minute flame-shapes even in her sleep. Chen's chatter grew more frantic, a nervous energy bleeding off. Varg retreated into a brooding silence, his mechanical enhancements clicking softly with his every breath. Only Aris seemed untouched, his mental fortress holding.
Ryosuke felt it too. The System's constant data stream was a cold comfort. He saw the fractures forming in his team's cohesion. They were being pulled apart by expectation, by scrutiny, by the sheer weight of being the ones to watch.
[Team Cohesion: 82% (Down from 89%). Stress-induced performance degradation probable in prolonged engagements.]
He needed to fix it. Not with a briefing, but with a reminder.
On the night before the Gauntlet's commencement, he gathered them not in their cargo bay, but on the observation deck of their staging hangar, with the silent, looming form of the Steadfast behind them. The arena city glittered below, a jewel of false light in the volcanic darkness.
"We're not here for them," Ryosuke said, his voice cutting through the tense silence. He didn't gesture to the city, to the holograms replaying their victories. "We're not here for rankings, or broadcasts, or the approval of generals who see us as data points."
He looked at each of them. "Sera. You're not here to prove you can control your fire. You already can. You're here because your fire, controlled, can save lives. It can cauterize a wound in a hull, it can light the dark, it can forge a path where there is none."
He turned to Chen. "Chen. You're not here to be the fastest. You're here because your speed lets you be where we need you, when we need you. You're our shadow, our scout, the one who sees the trap before it springs."
"Varg." The big man looked up, his eyes guarded. "You're not a blunt instrument. You are our foundation. When everything shakes, you are the unbreakable rock we plant our flag on. Your strength isn't for breaking enemies; it's for holding the line so the rest of us can do our jobs."
Finally, Aris. "Aris. You are our balance. When the world tries to tip us over, you are the quiet, immovable weight that steadies us. Your will is the anchor in the storm."
He paused, letting his words sink in. "They call us Obsidian. They think it's because we're hard, because we're sharp." A faint, genuine smile touched his lips. "But obsidian is forged in fire and quenched. It's not born hard. It's made that way, under pressure, together. That's us. We are not their weapon. We are each other's forge. Tomorrow, we go into the Gauntlet. Forget the cameras. Forget the rankings. Fight for the person to your left and your right. That is the only weight that matters."
He didn't wait for a response. He simply nodded and walked towards the Steadfast, placing a hand on its cool, armored foot. A silent communion.
One by one, they joined him. Sera placed her hand beside his. Then Chen. Varg's large, augmented palm covered a servo joint. Aris rested his fingertips lightly on the hull.
No words were needed. The fractures, for now, were sealed under a layer of reforged resolve.
---
GAUNTLET COMMENCEMENT.
The announcement boomed across the Colosseum at dawn. The terrain of the main arena had transformed overnight. It was now a sprawling, kilometers-wide mosaic of different environments—a frozen tundra bled into a radioactive desert, which gave way to a fungal jungle, all overshadowed by the floating, broken spires of a holographic ancient city. Hazards flickered to life: patrolling autonomous drone tanks, nests of simulated lesser Kaiju, and environmental dangers like ion storms and sudden lava geysers.
The rules were simple: survive. Complete secondary objectives for advantages. Eliminate other teams by disabling their mechs or capturing their home beacons. The last team standing, or the team with the most objective points after 72 continuous hours, would win.
Forty-seven teams deployed from their hangars simultaneously, a thunderous symphony of mech-footfalls and thruster-ignitions that shook the volcano. Team Obsidian launched in the Steadfast, their starting position a rocky plateau overlooking the fungal jungle.
Their high seeding granted them an initial advantage: a satellite uplink revealing the locations of three resource caches and the first secondary objective—Neutralize the "Brood-Nest" in Sector Gamma-7.
"Move," Ryosuke said. "Fast and quiet. We hit the nearest cache, then the objective. Let the others brawl in the opening minutes."
The Steadfast moved with a surprising quietness, Ryosuke using subtle applications of Infinity to dampen the sound of its footfalls. They secured the cache—extra power cells and a set of seismic grenades—without incident.
The Brood-Nest was a nightmarish structure of pulsating organic matter and sharp chitin, spawning endless streams of small, fast bio-drones. It was defended by a team from the Xenobiology Defense Institute, piloting a mech covered in symbiotic armor that reacted to attacks.
A conventional assault would be a slog. Ryosuke saw a better way.
"Chen, map the nest's thermal signature. Find the core reactor. Sera, you're going to cook it from the inside. Varg, Aris, you're on defense. The Xeno-mech will counterattack the moment we strike."
As Chen pinpointed the weak spot, Ryosuke piloted the Steadfast to a specific vantage point. He raised the mech's arm, not to fire, but to point.
"Sera, on my mark, channel everything you have into a single, needle-thin lance. You're not shooting at it. You're feeding the fire already there."
He used Blue. Not on the nest, but on the superheated air inside the nest's core, as seen through Chen's thermal mapping. He created a microscopic, devastatingly powerful point of attraction within the reactor chamber itself.
"MARK!"
Sera fired. A blinding, white-hot thread of plasma streaked from the Steadfast's cannon. It didn't impact the nest's exterior. It was sucked into the point of Ryosuke's Blue, piercing straight through armor and matter to reach the heart.
The effect was catastrophic. The internal pressure, already immense, was violently amplified. The Brood-Nest didn't explode. It imploded, then erupted in a gout of flame and bio-matter, collapsing in on itself.
The Xeno-mech, its symbiotic armor writhing in agony, charged in blind rage. Varg met it with the Steadfast's shield, the impact ringing like a cathedral bell. Aris used his telekinesis to trip its leading foot. Off-balance, it stumbled, and Sera finished it with a plasma bolt to its cockpit sensor suite.
[Secondary Objective Complete: +500 Points.]
[Team Eliminated: Xenobiology Defense Institute.]
It was a swift, brutal demonstration of synergistic power. In the command center, officers exchanged looks. "He's not just using his team's abilities," a Star Fleet tactician noted. "He's creating… combinatorial effects. Turning a pyrokinetic into a surgical bomber. That's command genius."
The Gauntlet wore on. Hours bled into a day. They fought through the frozen wastes, using Sera's heat to melt ice traps. They navigated the radioactive desert, with Chen's speed scouting safe paths and Aris using telekinesis to move shielding debris.
They clashed with other teams. A brutal, close-quarters brawl with the Astartes Neophytes in their Dreadnought-training frame ended with Ryosuke using a complex series of Red pulses to literally bounce the heavier mech into a lava flow. A hit-and-run engagement with the Coruscant Aces in their agile starfighter-mech hybrids was countered by Chen's predictive tracking and Sera's wide-area plasma bursts acting as flak.
They were dominant. But the Gauntlet was designed to exhaust. After twenty-seven hours of constant combat, fatigue was a tangible enemy. The Steadfast was battered, its shield generator fried, armor plate hanging loose. Inside, the team was running on stimulants and willpower.
It was then, in the shadow of the floating city ruins, that they encountered their true test.
Not a team from another academy. A Wildcard.
The Gauntlet rules allowed for the introduction of unannounced, non-cadet units for "adaptive stress testing." What emerged from a dimensional rift in the city's plaza was not a mech, but a War Walker—a smaller, bipedal armored vehicle from the Warhammer 40k universe, piloted by a grizzled Imperial Guard Sentinel Pilot on loan as a training adversary. It was outdated, but its pilot was a veteran of a hundred wars, and its multi-laser and missile pod were very, very real.
And it had been hunting them.
It ambushed them from a crumbling tower, its opening salvo of missiles streaking down.
"INCOMING!" Chen screamed.
Ryosuke reacted. A full-power Infinity barrier bloomed above the Steadfast. The missiles detonated against it in a firestorm of shrapnel and flame, but the barrier held. The strain, however, was immense. Ryosuke felt a sharp, hot pain lance through his temples.
The Sentinel dropped to the ground, its multi-laser whining as it charged.
"We can't take a sustained fight!" Varg yelled. "Our armor's compromised!"
"Fall back! Use the ruins!" Ryosuke ordered, piloting the Steadfast into a canyon of collapsed buildings.
The Sentinel was relentless. It was slower, but its pilot knew urban combat. It used cover, set up crossfires with its single autonomous drone, and herded them towards a dead-end.
Trapped in a rubble-strewn courtyard, with the Sentinel advancing, its laser burning through the debris they hid behind, Ryosuke saw their options vanish. A direct fight was suicide. Retreat was cut off.
He looked at his team's exhausted faces in the cockpit feed. Sera's hands were trembling from overuse. Chen's eyes were bloodshot from data overload. Varg was bleeding from a cut on his forehead where a console had shattered. Aris was pale, his mental fortitude stretched thin.
They couldn't win this by being stronger. The veteran pilot was better.
They had to be smarter. They had to be a team.
"New plan," Ryosuke said, his voice cutting through the despair. "We give him exactly what he expects. And then we change the game. Varg, on my signal, you kick that rubble pile at our three o'clock, full force. Make a distraction. Sera, the moment he turns his gun towards the noise, you superheat the air directly above his cockpit. Not to melt it, to create a massive thermal bloom. Chen, you use that bloom to mask your signal and take control of his one drone—turn it against him. Aris… you're going to lift me."
"What?" four voices chorused.
"You're going to use your telekinesis to throw me, in the Steadfast, straight up. Just for a second. Just high enough."
Understanding dawned, followed by horror. "The structural integrity—" Varg began.
"Will hold. Trust me. Now, execute!"
They moved as one. Varg's powerful kick sent a cascade of rubble clattering. The Sentinel's laser turret whirred towards the noise. Sera focused, and the air above the War Walker shimmered and roared with convecting heat, blinding its thermal sights. Chen's fingers flew over his console, and the Sentinel's own drone suddenly spun and sprayed its back armor with stubber rounds.
In the confusion, Aris closed his eyes. Every ounce of his telekinetic power wrapped around the battered Steadfast. With a grunt of immense strain, he lifted.
The eighty-ton mech rose five meters into the air, just as the Sentinel pilot, realizing the drone trick, turned his multi-laser back towards them.
He saw the Steadfast hanging, impossibly, in the air. A perfect, stationary target.
He fired.
And Ryosuke, suspended in mid-air, used Red.
He didn't repel the laser. He repelled himself.
The Steadfast, already moving upward from Aris's throw, was violently shoved sideways by Ryosuke's own power, a desperate, physics-defying dodge. The multi-laser beam sliced through the space where its chest had been a millisecond before.
The sudden, unnatural lateral movement was too much for the already strained leg actuators. With a sound of shearing metal, the Steadfast's left leg buckled. The mech crashed down, not on the Sentinel, but beside it, on its side.
But it was close. And its one functioning arm was within reach.
"VARG! NOW! THE COCKPIT HATCH!"
Varg, seeing the plan complete itself, didn't hesitate. He channeled every joule of his augmented strength through the Steadfast's remaining fist. It shot forward, not as a punch, but as a focused pile-driver blow, aimed not at the armor, but at the manual release lever on the Sentinel's cockpit canopy.
The lever shattered. The canopy blew open with a hiss, exposing the stunned veteran pilot.
A capture-net shot from the Steadfast's shoulder launcher, ensnaring the man before he could grab his sidearm.
Silence.
The Sentinel's systems powered down. The drone fell lifeless.
In the wrecked courtyard, the Steadfast lay on its side, one leg destroyed, smoke pouring from its joints. The Sentinel stood dormant, its pilot trapped.
They had won. Not by overpowering. By sacrificing their stability, using their unique abilities in a chain of desperation that only a team forged in absolute trust could execute.
[Wildcard Neutralized: +1000 Points.]
[Team Status: Mech Critical. Fatigue Critical. Cohesion: 95%.]
Back in the command center, the silence was profound. Then, Commandant Idris slowly began to clap. A single, steady, respectful beat. One by one, other officers joined in.
On the spectator decks, the applause was thunderous.
In the broken cockpit, Ryosuke looked at his team. They were battered, broken, but alive. And they were grinning—wild, exhausted, triumphant grins.
"We," Sera said, her voice ragged, "are definitely obsidian."
Ryosuke leaned back, the pain in his head a small price. They had carried the weight. Together. And they had not broken. They had been quenched.
The Gauntlet was far from over, but in that moment, they had already won everything that mattered.