Chen Wei looked like a man attending his own funeral.
He was standing outside the simulation entrance with his earth-element gauntlets strapped on and his jaw set in the particular way of someone who had already accepted a bad outcome and was now just managing the timeline. Liu Fang, the wind specialist, was stretching her legs against a wall with the nervous energy of a sprinter before a race. Bai Shan, water element, sat on a bench cleaning his nails and projecting the kind of calm that was clearly performance.
Team Four. The team with the Mortal Six.
Shen walked up. Frostfang on his back. Training wraps fresh. The bruise on his ribs from the last assassination attempt was yellow and fading.
"Morning," he said.
Chen Wei nodded. Liu Fang stopped stretching. Bai Shan kept cleaning his nails.
"So," Chen Wei said. He was a big kid, Nirvana 2, earth element. Built like a wall, moved like one too. "You've done this before? Dungeon simulations?"
"Not simulations. Dungeons."
"Right. The Hell dungeon thing." Chen Wei rubbed his jaw. "Look. We voted to keep standard difficulty because none of us wanted to be the team that asked for easy mode. But I'm going to be honest with you. If this goes wrong, my scholarship review is in two weeks, and I cannot afford a bad score."
"It won't go wrong."
"That's what my cousin said before he failed the Iron Gate qualifier. He sells insurance now."
Shen looked at his team. Three Nirvana-level students, all nervous, all skeptical, all expecting the Mortal Six to be a dead weight they'd carry through five rooms of escalating difficulty. He had about thirty seconds before the simulation door opened to change that assessment.
"Listen," he said. "I'm the weakest fighter here. That's not going to change in the next thirty seconds. What I can do is read a fight faster than anyone in this class, position our team for maximum advantage, and make sure nobody takes a hit they don't have to. I've been fighting since before any of you entered an academy, and I am very good at making sure the people next to me survive. Do what I say, when I say it, and we'll clear this faster than any team today."
Chen Wei stared at him. Liu Fang stared at him. Bai Shan stopped cleaning his nails.
"What if you're wrong?" Liu Fang asked.
"Then we lose and I'm the one who gets blamed. The Mortal Six called the shots and it didn't work. Your scholarships are fine."
The logic was clean enough. Chen Wei looked at the others. They shrugged. It was the best bad option available.
The simulation door opened. They went in.
---
Room one. A forest clearing with three Mortal-9 beasts — simulated Stone Wolves. Standard opener, testing team coordination and basic combat ability.
Shen read the room in two seconds. Three wolves, spaced ten meters apart. The clearing had a boulder on the left, a fallen tree on the right, a stream running through the center. One wolf was larger than the others. Pack leader.
"Chen, center. Draw the leader. Liu, right flank, stay mobile, keep the second wolf turning. Bai, freeze the stream and funnel the third wolf toward me."
They moved. Not smoothly, not with the rehearsed precision of a team that had trained together. But they moved, because the instructions were clear and specific and left no room for confusion.
Chen Wei planted himself in front of the pack leader and raised his earth gauntlets. The wolf lunged. Chen caught it, his earth element absorbing the impact, his feet sliding back two inches in the dirt. Strong. Reliable. The wall held.
Liu Fang's wind carried her to the right flank in a blur of speed. She didn't engage the second wolf directly. She circled it, slashing with a short blade on each pass, keeping the beast disoriented and facing the wrong direction.
Bai Shan's water hit the stream and Shen's Frostfang hit the water. The stream froze solid in three seconds, creating an ice barrier that channeled the third wolf away from the main fight and toward Shen's position. The wolf rounded the ice wall and met Frostfang. One strike. Clean.
Twelve seconds. Room cleared. No injuries.
"Next room," Shen said.
---
Room two. An underground chamber with five Nirvana-1 constructs, humanoid, armed with spiritual weapons. Combat simulation at the team's average level.
Shen assessed. Five targets. Tight space. The constructs were fast but predictable, following combat AI that the academy had programmed for student-level opponents. They'd attack in pairs, with one reserved for flanking.
"Chen, take the door. Nothing gets behind us. Liu, I need a wind wall across the right side, three meters high, block their flank route. Bai, flood the floor. I'll freeze it."
"All of it?"
"All of it."
Bai Shan raised both hands. Water surged from his palms and covered the chamber floor in a shallow pool. Shen swept Frostfang across the surface. The water froze. The entire floor became a sheet of ice.
The constructs charged. Their feet hit the ice and their combat AI, designed for normal footing, couldn't compensate. Three of them slid. One recovered. Two went down.
Chen Wei caught the one that recovered at the door, gauntlets smashing into its chest. Liu Fang's wind wall redirected the flanking construct into the ice, where it slipped and crashed into the far wall. Shen finished the two that had fallen, driving Frostfang into their cores before they could stand.
The remaining two constructs adapted, lowering their centers of gravity, moving carefully on the ice. Shen called adjustments. "Liu, shove the left one into Chen's range. Bai, trip the right one."
A wind burst sent the left construct sliding toward Chen Wei, who crushed it against the doorframe. Bai Shan hit the right one's feet with a water jet that froze on contact, welding its boots to the ice. Shen closed the distance and ended it.
Twenty-two seconds. Room cleared. No injuries.
In the observation area outside the simulation, the replay feeds showed the other teams and Professor Luo watching. Room one and two clear times were displayed on a scoreboard. Team Four's twelve seconds for room one was the fastest by a factor of three. Room two's twenty-two seconds was faster than every other team's room one.
---
Rooms three and four escalated. Nirvana 2 constructs, then Nirvana 3, with terrain hazards added. Shen adapted, positioning his team around the hazards, using each person's element to modify the environment before engaging the enemies.
The pattern was always the same. Shen read the room. Called positions. Assigned roles. The team executed. No discussion, no debate, no collaboration. Just instructions and compliance.
It worked. Room three fell in thirty-one seconds. Room four in forty-eight, the extra time because a Nirvana 3 construct got creative and tried to collapse the ceiling. Liu Fang's wind deflected the falling rock. Nobody was hit.
The scoreboard updated. Team Four: rooms one through four cleared in under two minutes total. The next closest team was at four minutes. The prodigy class had stopped whispering about the Mortal Six and started watching in silence.
Nira Hale stood at the observation window with her clipboard forgotten in her hand. Her lips were moving slightly, the way they did when she was analyzing something that didn't fit her categories.
---
Room five. The final room. Mini-boss.
The simulation generated a Nirvana 4 armored golem, three meters tall, made of spiritual stone with reinforced joints and a core of compressed earth energy. Slow but powerful. One hit from its fists would break bones through any defense below Nirvana 3.
Shen assessed. The golem had three weaknesses visible through Blueprint Sight: joint seams at the knees, elbows, and the back of the neck where the control core sat. The Blueprint overlay showed the core's exact position, five centimeters behind the base of the skull, accessible only from behind.
"Same pattern," Shen said. "Chen, frontal engagement. Hold its attention. Liu, mobility. Circle. I need it turning. Bai, water on the floor, standard freeze."
They moved. Chen Wei engaged the golem head-on, his earth gauntlets meeting its stone fists with impacts that shook the room. Each hit drove Chen back a step. He was outclassed in raw power, but his earth element gave him enough absorption to survive the exchange.
Liu Fang circled. Fast, darting, using wind bursts to stay just out of the golem's reach. Every time it turned toward her, Chen Wei hit it from the front. Every time it turned back to Chen, Liu Fang slashed at its knee joints. The golem pivoted, confused, trying to track two targets at once.
Bai Shan flooded the floor. Shen froze it. The golem's massive feet lost traction.
Shen circled to the rear. The golem's back was exposed while it focused on Chen and Liu. The control core was right there, behind the neck plate. One precise thrust through the seam.
He closed the distance. Drew Frostfang back.
The golem's combat AI detected the flanking approach. It abandoned Chen and Liu, spun, and swept its arm in a wide arc toward Shen. Fast for something that size. Faster than the front-loaded programming had suggested.
Shen dodged. Mostly. The golem's stone fist caught his left side, a glancing blow that didn't connect squarely but still carried enough force to lift him off his feet and throw him three meters into the frozen floor. He hit the ice, slid, and felt ribs bruise on the same side the assassin had kicked him last week.
The golem turned toward Liu Fang. She was in its path, caught mid-circle, too close to dodge. Its fist rose.
Shen was on his feet before he finished processing the pain. He threw himself between Liu Fang and the golem and drove Frostfang upward into the elbow joint of the descending arm. Ice exploded through the joint. The arm locked, frozen mid-swing, the fist stopping two feet from Liu Fang's face.
"Move!" he barked.
She moved. Shen ripped Frostfang free. The golem swung with its other arm. Chen Wei intercepted, catching the stone fist with both gauntlets, his earth element absorbing the impact at the cost of a cracked floor beneath his feet.
Bai Shan hit the golem's legs with a concentrated water jet. Shen froze it. Both knees locked. The golem staggered, immobilized from the waist down.
Shen limped behind it. Found the neck seam. Drove Frostfang through.
The golem's core shattered. The construct crumbled into rubble.
Clear time for room five: one minute, fourteen seconds. Total simulation clear time: three minutes, seventeen seconds.
The scoreboard updated. Team Four. First place. By a margin so wide that the second-place team, still working through room four, stopped fighting to look at the display.
---
The training hall was quiet when Team Four emerged from the simulation. Twenty students, Professor Luo, and two teaching assistants, all looking at the replay feeds that had shown the entire run in real-time.
Shen's side ached where the golem had tagged him. Liu Fang was rubbing her arms, the residual wind energy from her rapid movements making her muscles twitch. Chen Wei's gauntlets had stress cracks from absorbing the golem's punches. Bai Shan's hands were raw from continuous water projection.
Professor Luo checked the scoreboard. Checked it again.
"Three minutes, seventeen seconds. A class record for first-week simulations." She looked at Shen. "The tactical coordination was well above standard prodigy-class performance. Who called the formations?"
"I did," Shen said.
"Your combat style during the final room was unorthodox. You put yourself between the golem and your teammate despite being the lowest-cultivation member."
"Liu Fang was in the strike path."
"Most team leaders would have called for evasion rather than interposition."
Shen didn't respond to that. On the front lines, you didn't call for evasion when someone was in a strike path. You got between them and the thing trying to kill them, because calling took time and time was measured in broken bones.
Professor Luo wrote something on her evaluation sheet. The class broke for the next team's run. Shen's team moved to the staging area.
Chen Wei sat on a bench and examined his cracked gauntlets. He was quiet for two minutes. Liu Fang and Bai Shan had drifted to the water station, leaving the two of them.
"That was the fastest clear in prodigy class history," Chen Wei said.
"Good."
"It was also the most uncomfortable three minutes of my life."
Shen looked at him.
"You didn't ask me where I wanted to stand. You didn't ask Liu where she was comfortable circling. You didn't check if Bai had enough energy for continuous water projection. You just called positions and we went." Chen Wei pulled off his cracked gauntlets and set them on the bench. His hands were shaking. Not from exhaustion. From the adrenaline crash of being moved around a combat space by someone else's will without any input. "I've been in team exercises since I was twelve. I've never had someone treat me like a piece on a board."
"The positions were optimal."
"I know. That's the problem." Chen Wei rubbed his hands together. "You're good at winning. I'm not arguing that. Three minutes and seventeen seconds speaks for itself. But you fight like we're not people. Like we're tools you're placing for maximum effect." He looked at Shen. The big kid's face was honest and uncertain, the face of someone saying something difficult because not saying it was worse. "On the front lines, maybe that works. Here, in a team, with people who have to trust you, it doesn't. You can't just move us. You have to talk to us."
Shen sat with that. The training hall was filling with noise from the next team's simulation run. Cheering, the thud of combat, an instructor's whistle.
"I'll work on it," he said.
"Good. Because we placed first, and I want to keep placing first. But I also want to not feel like a chess piece when we do it." Chen Wei stood. Picked up his cracked gauntlets. "You fight like you're already alone, Shen. Like the rest of us are just terrain you're moving through."
He walked to the water station. Shen sat on the bench and listened to the next team fail room three, and Chen Wei's words sat in his chest like a bone he'd swallowed whole.
