CycoPass.
I've recently started working with a new AI editor, and as you may have noticed, the writing style has changed somewhat because of it.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the new style. Do you prefer it over the previous chapters, or do you think the older style worked better?
As always, feel free to leave your feedback in the comments and let me know what you think.
Chapter 34: Slice of Life —2.
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Location: First-Year Naturals Private Training Ground.
Omni POV.
Daniel stood at the far end of their side of the court, rolling his shoulders slowly. He looked, as he generally did, like someone had built an eleven-year-old out of material intended for someone considerably older. The combat uniform sat tight across his shoulders despite being the largest size available. His broad hands flexed around the ball as he tossed it once, twice, testing its weight.
Across the net, Raymond stood in what he appeared to believe was a ready stance. His glasses had already slid down his nose once and he'd pushed them back up with two fingers. Beside him, Erica stood with her arms loosely at her sides, watching Daniel with the quiet, unblinking attention of someone who had already calculated this situation and was simply waiting for reality to confirm her math.
"You've got this, right?" Leon called over from the baseline, eyebrows raised.
Daniel turned toward him, the expression on his face the picture of uncomplicated confidence. He tossed the ball up once more, caught it, and nodded.
"Don't worry," he said. "I've got this."
Leon studied him for exactly one second. Then he decided to trust Daniel — not because he believed him, but because the alternative was standing here all afternoon.
"Alright," he said, stepping back. "Your serve."
Daniel turned toward the net with the focused expression of a soldier approaching a fortified position. He bounced the ball against his hands once. Took a breath. Then tossed it high into the air — much higher than was technically necessary — and launched himself upward after it with a full two-step approach and a jump that briefly put his head above the net.
The contact was enormous.
*WHACK.*
For approximately half a second, the ball was visible — a pale blur accelerating across the training ground at a speed that suggested Daniel had confused a volleyball serve with a cannon test. Then it crossed the net. Then it crossed the entire opposite side of the court. Then it crossed the cedar trees.
Then it was gone.
The five of them stood in silence, staring at the empty sky where the ball had last been observed.
Raymond turned his head slowly, following the invisible trajectory out over the treeline and into the middle distance.
"..." Raymond said nothing.
Erica said nothing.
Martha, who had positioned herself in a chair beside the court with a notebook open on her knee and a pencil in her hand, looked up. She looked at the space where the ball had been. She looked at Daniel.
She made a small mark in her notebook.
"Out," she said.
The silence stretched for another moment.
Then Leon pointed at Daniel.
"You said you had this."
Daniel had the grace to look apologetic. "Sorry," he said. And then, with the earnest sincerity of someone who genuinely meant it: "I might have hit it a little too hard."
###############################################################################################################################################################################################################
Five minutes later
They discovered a second problem. Nobody actually knew how to play.
This was a harder issue to identify than it sounded, because all five of them *believed* they knew how to play. They had watched multiple seasons of Haikyuu. They understood rotations, received patterns, quick sets, and line shots. They knew the terminology. They knew the rules. They knew what a libero was and what the setter's job involved and exactly what it meant to call a ball in the middle of a rally.
Knowing something and doing something, as it turned out, were two entirely separate disciplines.
Daniel kept hitting the ball too hard. Not slightly too hard — catastrophically too hard. Every spike he attempted at anything approaching full strength resulted in the ball exiting the court at speed. By the third attempt, Raymond had instinctively taken a step backward whenever Daniel's hand rose above his head.
Raymond kept setting the ball before anyone was ready. He'd identified the pass coming in, tracked it, moved into position with the precision of someone who spent three hours a day drawing a bow — and then released the set while his teammates were still looking the other direction. The ball would hang in the air, perfectly placed, for a full second of absolute silence, before dropping untouched to the ground.
Erica kept outrunning everyone. Her footwork was flawless, her reactions were faster than everyone else's combined, and she consistently arrived at the ball before any of her teammates could reach it and then had nobody in position to receive her pass because she'd gotten there too quickly. She didn't appear frustrated by this. She simply recalibrated and moved to the next ball with the economical patience of someone who had accepted that her team existed at a slightly different speed than she did.
Leon was spending more time analyzing than playing. Every time the ball crossed toward his side, he identified it, assessed the trajectory, began narrating the optimal response — and then the ball landed before he'd finished narrating. He was, he privately admitted, being extremely useful in a way that was producing zero points.
Martha sat beside the court with her notebook and her pencil and a deeply serene expression, recording everything with the diligence of a field researcher who had been waiting her entire life for an opportunity like this.
After two rotations, Daniel turned toward her.
"Current score?" he asked.
Martha glanced down at her notebook.
"Three to one," she said.
Daniel looked across at his teammate. "Who's winning?"
Martha blinked. "...You are."
The group looked at one another.
Then, almost simultaneously, they all started laughing — the slightly helpless laughter of people who have realized they're bad at something in a way that is somehow funnier than being good at it would have been.
##########################################################################################################################################
The first set was ugly. There was no other word for it.
Serves went out. Serves went into the net. Serves hit the net post and ricocheted at angles that suggested they'd been served by someone who had never played volleyball and had also possibly never seen a ball before.
Receives bounced off forearms, off palms, off one memorable occasion the side of Raymond's face when he misread a serve and dove in completely the wrong direction. He came up from the sand, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and said nothing, which somehow made it worse.
Leon accidentally set the ball backwards — not slightly backwards, but directly into the space behind him, where nobody was, because nobody had any reason to be there — and then spent several seconds staring at the spot where the ball had landed with the expression of a man whose worldview had been lightly shaken.
Daniel spiked directly into the net.
Then he spiked directly into the net again.
After the second time he stood at the net, looking at it with an expression of genuine personal betrayal, as though the net had done this deliberately.
Raymond somehow managed to dive for a ball that was not heading toward him — not even close to heading toward him — reaching it only after it had bounced once and begun decelerating. He hit it anyway. Nobody was sure why. Raymond himself didn't appear entirely certain.
And then something changed.
It started with Erica. It always started with Erica.
She had been watching the ball move across the court for several rallies with the focused quiet of someone solving a problem in their head. Not frustrated. Not amused. Just watching. Processing. The way she watched an opponent during a spar — not the ball specifically, but the system around the ball. Who was moving where. What angle the pass was coming from. What position Raymond naturally defaulted to when he was tracking something airborne.
She began adjusting. Quietly. Without announcing it.
The next time a pass came toward the right side of the court, instead of going to meet it — which put her in front of everyone and left no one to receive — she deliberately held her position for one beat. Let the pass settle. Then moved.
The receive was clean. Not flashy. Just controlled. The ball rose at exactly the angle needed.
Beside her, Raymond had watched this. He'd watched where her feet went, where her arms angled. His mind, trained for months to track the arc of an arrow from a release point to a target, quietly mapped the ball's trajectory the same way.
"There," he said — quietly, mostly to himself.
His hands moved.
The set wasn't perfect, but it was good. The ball rose to the left side of the net with a clean arc, hanging just long enough.
Erica was already moving.
She'd read Raymond's hands before the ball left them — the slight adjustment in his wrists, the angle of his shoulders. She'd already committed. Her feet planted, her body coiled, and she launched herself upward on the left side with the fluid efficiency of someone who had been throwing herself at things much more dangerous than a volleyball net for the better part of a year.
The spike was a line shot. Clean. Low over the net. Finding the sideline.
It hit the ground without anyone on the other side having time to react.
Silence.
Then Martha raised her hand.
"Point."
Erica landed. For a moment she just stood there, looking at the spot where the ball had hit the court. Then a grin appeared — small, private, the kind she didn't usually let anyone see — and she pumped her fist once.
"...I liked that," she said.
Across the net, Leon and Daniel had completely forgotten they'd just lost a point.
"Did you see that?" Leon's grin was enormous.
"I did!" Daniel matched it perfectly.
They turned to face each other, the same realization arriving in both of them at exactly the same moment.
"A Hinata-Kageyama free quick attack!" they shouted together, at a volume that probably carried to the regular barracks.
Raymond looked between the two of them on the opposite side of the net. Then he looked at Erica.
Erica's expression suggested she found this reaction acceptable. "They're not wrong," she said.
Raymond considered this and then — quietly, privately — allowed himself a small smile as well.
"Daniel."
They were setting up for Erica's serve. Leon had positioned himself near the center of the court, bouncing lightly on his heels, already thinking three plays ahead.
"Yeah, Leon."
Daniel was at the net, hands loose at his sides, watching the opposite side with the simple and uncomplicated focus of someone who had decided to stop thinking and start doing.
"It's time to lock in."
Daniel nodded slowly. "Right."
Neither of them said anything else. They didn't need to.
The first set ended shortly afterward.
26 — 24.
It was close. Closer than it probably should have been, given that Leon and Daniel had spent most of the set remembering they were supposed to be playing instead of watching the other team do things they found impressive. But the declaration came a rotation too late to matter.
Across the net, Raymond raised both arms toward Erica, palms out.
"We're the best," he announced.
Erica regarded the double high-five for a moment. Then she raised her hands and delivered two of the most precisely calibrated pats Leon had ever witnessed from a distance — enough contact to constitute a high-five, not enough to suggest she had strong feelings about it.
"Yeah," she said.
Raymond beamed.
##########################################################################################################################################
The second set was different.
The mistakes hadn't disappeared — but they'd thinned considerably, which in practical terms was what mattered. These weren't ordinary teenagers flailing through a new sport on a Saturday afternoon. They were military cadets whose bodies had spent seven months being systematically optimized by Sergeant Major Barnes, and that optimization didn't care whether the activity was combat or volleyball. Muscle memory was muscle memory. Reflexes were reflexes.
Their bodies adjusted faster than their minds did. Their feet started going where they needed to go before their brains had consciously decided to send them. Their arms angled without being told to angle. The sport was different from anything they'd trained for, but the underlying machinery was the same — and that machinery was very good.
Receives were being controlled. Passes were getting cleaner. The movement was starting to feel less like five people accidentally occupying the same space and more like something deliberate.
Daniel wanted to serve.
"Give me this one," he said, holding out a hand toward Leon with the confidence of someone who had learned from his first attempt and was now completely certain the second would go better.
Leon looked at him.
The look communicated a very specific thing, which was that Leon remembered the first serve with perfect clarity and had not yet arrived at a place where his memory and his trust were compatible.
Daniel's expression didn't waver. "I promise you," he said. "This one will be a win."
Leon held the look for another moment. Then he pocketed the ball.
"I'll serve," he said.
Daniel opened his mouth.
"You can spike," Leon added, already moving to the baseline.
Daniel immediately closed his mouth and nodded, reassessing his priorities in real time.
Leon bounced the ball once against the packed earth. Rolled his shoulders. His eyes tracked across the opposite side of the net — Raymond's ready position, Erica's weight distribution, the slight rightward lean that meant she was expecting him to go left. The wind was coming from the northwest at about six kilometers per hour, which would push a floater serve roughly half a meter off-line by the time it crossed the net. His lenses showing all this clearly.
Two-step approach.
He jumped.
The contact was clean. Not Daniel-clean — not the kind of contact that erased the ball from existence — but the kind that came from understanding precisely how much force the situation required and applying exactly that amount. The ball crossed the net in a flat, fast line, found the gap between Raymond's left and Erica's right, and hit the ground before either of them had fully committed to a direction.
Leon landed.
He ran toward Daniel.
"YEAAAAAH!"
The chest bump that followed was audible from every corner of the field. Daniel absorbed it with the easy grace of a man built to absorb things, and immediately scooped Leon up in a brief, crushing grip that Leon endured with the expression of someone who had learned to pick their battles.
"That's what I'm talking about!" Daniel declared, setting him down.
Leon was already moving toward Luxion. The small silver drone was hovering at the edge of the court, observing proceedings with the air of someone who had agreed to be here and was reconsidering that agreement.
Leon raised his hand.
Luxion immediately began retreating.
"Sir, I would like to point out that I do not have—"
"You too buddy!"
"—hands, and therefore the concept of a high-five is not—"
Leon's palm connected with the side of Luxion's casing with a sharp *clack*that sent the drone spinning laterally through the air. Luxion stabilized after approximately three meters, his red eye flickering with what any reasonable observer might have described as indignation.
He drifted back toward the court at a speed that suggested dignity.
"If you wished to express gratitude," he said, "a verbal acknowledgment would have been entirely sufficient."
"I got excited," Leon said.
"Clearly."
"Also, thanks. Your analysis was perfect as always."
Luxion paused. "You're welcome," he said, in a tone that suggested he had complicated feelings about being thanked for something he considered routine at this point.
Erica was watching them from across the net.
"Why are you thanking Luxion?" she asked.
The question carried a very specific quality. It wasn't curiosity. It was the question someone asked when they'd already formed a theory and wanted confirmation.
Leon opened his mouth, his mind working at quantum speeds looking for a believable lie, but alas, Luxion spoke first.
"It is simple," the drone said. "I have been assisting Sir Leon throughout this match."
The court went quiet.
Leon closed his eyes briefly.
'Traitor,' he thought.
When he opened them, all four of his teammates were looking at him. Daniel. Raymond. Martha, who had looked up from her notebook for the first time in twenty minutes. And Erica, whose expression hadn't changed but whose stillness had taken on a new and meaningful quality.
"What," said Daniel, "is he talking about."
Leon reached up and pressed one finger beneath his eye, pulling his lower eyelid down slightly to expose the thin edge of the contact lens resting against his iris.
"These," he said.
He let his eyelid go.
"They show me everything. Your likely movement based on your posture. Wind speed and direction. The gap in your defensive positioning. When Raymond's shoulders drop, it means his set is going to angle left by about fifteen degrees. When Erica shifts her weight to her right heel, she's about to—"
"Take them off," Erica said.
It wasn't a request. It wasn't angry. It was the tone she used when she'd assessed a situation and reached a conclusion, and the conclusion was not open for debate.
"Fine," Leon said.
He removed the lenses.
He held them up for a moment, the thin transparent discs barely visible between his fingers.
"Nine years," he said, mostly to himself. "Nine years wearing these every day." He turned them over once. "I don't think I took them off once the entire time."
He carefully handed them to Luxion, "Take care of these, I don't have to tell you how special they are?"
"No you don't, they were our first project together after all."
Facing his second serve, Leon felt the same. Nine years of constant use had done something interesting. The lenses had originally shown him everything — trajectory arcs, posture analysis, wind calculations, reaction windows. He'd used that data every day for nearly a decade, until the data had stopped being data and started being instinct. He could feel the wind without reading it. He could see the gaps without calculating them. The lenses had been training wheels, and somewhere in those years, he'd stopped needing them without noticing.
He tossed the ball high.Two-step approach. Clean contact. The ball found the gap between Raymond's left and Erica's right and hit the ground before either of them moved.
Silence.
"Hey." Daniel was looking at him. "I thought you took them off."
Leon caught the ball that Martha rolled back to him.
"I did," he said.
He shrugged, turning the ball over in his hands.
"I think I've been wearing those things for so long that at this point I can figure out what they would've shown me without them." He glanced up, something thoughtful in his expression. "It's less like thinking and more like... remembering what I'd see. If that makes sense."
It was quiet for a moment.
Then Raymond pushed his glasses up. "That's actually remarkable," he said, in the tone he used when something genuinely surprised him. "You essentially internalized an analytical framework to the point of—"
"Raymond."
"—automatic cognitive pattern recognition, which suggests the integration between the lens system and your existing—"
"Raymond."
Raymond stopped.
"Play," Leon said.
"Right," said Raymond.
###############################################################################################################################################################################################################
Now everyone understood what they were doing.
Not just Leon — all five of them, in their own ways, had stopped trying to play volleyball the way they'd seen it played and started playing it the way they actually knew how.
Leon's touches became deliberate. Every pass had a purpose behind it — not just getting the ball over the net, but placing it. Setting up the next touch before the current one landed. He wasn't narrating anymore. He was thinking in shapes.
Daniel discovered something fundamental.
Spiking was extraordinary.
The moment when the ball rose in exactly the right place — perfectly timed, perfectly positioned — and his whole body could commit to the swing without holding back, without worrying about the net or the angle or whether he was too far left — that moment was, in Daniel's quietly forming assessment, one of the better things he had encountered in recent memory.
Receiving was something he did.
Blocking was something he did acceptably.
Spiking was something that made him feel like the sport had been specifically invented for people built the way he was.
"LEON!"
The call came sharp and clear. Daniel was already moving.
Leon saw him. Tracked the position. His hands came up.
The set rose — clean, precise, hanging just inside the left antenna.
Daniel jumped.
Higher than he needed to.
Higher than felt strictly necessary.
*WHAM.*
The ball slammed into the court with an impact that kicked up a small cloud of dust.
Point.
Daniel landed, arms still raised, the follow-through of someone who had put everything into that swing and had zero regrets about it.
"AGAIN!" he roared.
"What are you, a dog?" Leon called back.
Daniel turned toward him with an expression of uncomplicated joy. "YES!"
Leon stared at him for exactly two seconds.
Then he retrieved the ball.
'Fine,' he thought.
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The third set arrived at something none of them had planned for.
Nobody was thinking anymore.
That sounds like a problem. For five people who were, collectively, among the more cognitively active individuals on the island, thinking less should have made them worse. Instead, somewhere between the second and third set, thought had become unnecessary — replaced by something faster, more immediate, and considerably more enjoyable.
They were simply playing.
Moving.
Reacting.
Trusting.
The instincts that Barnes had spent seven months hammering into them — the ones that made them step into contact before the brain had consciously decided to, that made them read a shoulder or a hip or a shift in weight before the follow-through arrived — those instincts didn't care what sport they were being used for. They worked just as well here.
Raymond's eyes moved and his hands moved with them. He didn't think *set to the left* — his hands were already going left because he'd read Erica's approach angle and the rest followed.
Erica didn't plan her dives. She was there before she decided to be there.
Daniel didn't calculate his spikes. He simply felt where the apex of the set was going to be and met it.
Leon didn't narrate. He read. He placed.
They weren't a team yet — not really, not in the way that word meant after years and battles and shared losses. But in this moment, on this scrubby rectangle of packed earth behind the Naturals barracks, they were something that rhymed with it.
"Left!" Raymond called.
Erica was already there.
Leon adjusted.
Daniel shifted for a block.
The rallies grew longer. Harder. Faster. More wrong in exactly the right ways — imperfect and urgent and alive.
A save. A receive. A set. A spike. A block. Another receive.
Again and again and again.
The score climbed without anyone watching it climb.
2-2.
5-5.
8-8.
10-10.
Every point felt earned in the specific way that things only feel earned when they're genuinely difficult. Sweat dripped freely. Legs burned. Lungs complained, then stopped complaining because nobody was listening to them anyway.
Nobody cared.
The ball stayed in the air.
Leon dove — full extension, one hand, getting under it with about a centimeter to spare. The save was ugly. It didn't need to be pretty. It just needed to be there.
Raymond set — quick, instinctive, barely a touch, letting the ball's own momentum do most of the work.
Erica jumped.
The spike hit the court with a sound that satisfied something very specific.
Daniel blocked on the next exchange — both hands above the net, redirecting rather than smashing, the ball popping upward at a clean angle.
Leon chased it.
One hand.
Save.
The rally continued.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Nobody wanted to lose this point. Nobody would have admitted how much they didn't want to lose it, because they were all trying to appear significantly more relaxed than they were. But the evidence was in their feet, which were working harder than any casual afternoon had a right to demand.
The score reached 14-14.
Match point.
Both sides.
The next point would decide everything.
The serve crossed the net low and fast. The receive came up clean. The set hung at the antenna. The spike drove down. The block redirected. The receive scrambled. The set rose again. The spike hammered in. The save got under it with nothing left to spare.
The rally kept going.
Everyone was exhausted.
Everyone was smiling.
Fifteen exchanges. Twenty. The kind of rally that in professional volleyball would have had the crowd on their feet. Here it had Martha along with a small crowd of onlookers who had appeared out of nowhere, on their feet, watching with wide eyes as they cheated their favourite team.
The score had stopped mattering.
The ball had stopped being a ball.
"LEON!"
Daniel's voice.
Urgent. Clear. The exact sound of someone who had identified a moment and was not going to let it pass.
Leon was already tracking. His hands rose.
The set was — there was no other word for it — 'perfect.' Height, position, timing. It rose to the left antenna and hung there for the fraction of a second that was all a spiker of Daniel's ability needed.
For a single, suspended moment, time seemed to hesitate.
Daniel left the ground.
Higher than before. Higher than any of his previous jumps. Higher than seemed strictly possible for someone not actively using their Grace — except that somewhere in the accumulated momentum of thirty consecutive rallies and a match point and the specific electricity of a moment that felt important, something had stopped obeying that boundary.
Unconsciously mana flowed into his body, augmenting it. Neither Daniel nor anyone else noticed.
Not until — *BOOOOM.*
The sound was not the sound a volleyball made when it hit the ground.
It was the sound something made when it stopped being a volleyball.
The court froze.
A small cloud of leather fragments drifted gently across the training ground, carried on the northwest wind. The rope marking the court boundary trembled from the impact wave. A bird that had been sitting in the cedar trees departed at speed.
Daniel landed.
He was still in his follow-through position — arm extended, weight forward, everything committed to a spike that no longer had an object.
He stared at the small debris field where the ball had been.
"..." Raymond.
"..." Erica.
"..." Leon.
Martha slowly lowered her eyes from the sky, where she'd instinctively tracked the trajectory, to the ground, where the trajectory had reached its conclusion. Then she looked at her notebook. Then back at the court.
"I don't think that's legal," she said.
Three seconds.
Nobody moved.
Then Leon pointed at Daniel with the specific energy of someone who has just witnessed something they will be referencing for years.
"You blew the ball up."
Daniel turned toward him. His expression was the expression of a very large person who had just done something by accident that he would not have done on purpose and was processing this at speed.
"I DIDN'T MEAN TO," he said.
"Say that to the ball!"
"It was an accident!"
"It is in several pieces, Daniel, it is past caring about your intentions—"
Raymond dropped to his knees.
Not because anything had happened to his legs. He simply arrived on his knees, because that was where laughter had taken him. His glasses slid completely off his nose and into the sand and he didn't reach for them. His shoulders were shaking. No sound was coming out of him yet, which somehow made it funnier.
Erica sat down.
Directly. Immediately. As if her legs had quietly filed a formal request to be horizontal and she had approved it on the spot. She landed on her back in the sand and stared at the sky.
Leon collapsed beside her. He wasn't sure exactly when he'd decided to do that. It just seemed like the right response to the situation.
For a long moment, the only sound was Raymond's delayed laughter arriving all at once — the kind that had been building up behind a dam and had finally found a way through. It was completely undignified. Daniel started laughing too, which made everything worse, because Daniel laughing was a physical event. Martha had both hands over her mouth and her shoulders were going.
They lay there. All four of them sprawled across the sand in various states of collapse, exhausted and sweaty and entirely comfortable with being both.
The winner of the third set would remain forever unknown.
The evidence suggested it didn't matter.
###############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
After a while — not a short while, but the right amount of while — the laughter settled into something quieter. Contentment, maybe. The particular softness of having done something genuinely fun for the first time in a long time.
They lay looking up at the sky.
The island's wind moved through the cedar trees. Somewhere across the base, the regular recruits were finishing their afternoon drills — the distant rhythm of Barnes's voice carrying faintly on the air, the measured cadence of boots on packed earth. The world beyond the training ground continued being the world.
In here it was quiet.
The footsteps were soft — careful, like someone trying not to break the moment. Martha had retrieved her notebook from the chair and walked across the court, and now she stood at the edge of the group, looking down at four people lying in the sand with varying degrees of dignity.
Her expression was the one she got when she was deciding something.
"That looked like so much fun," she said.
She said it simply. Without qualification. Without apology. Just the observation, offered to the air and to whoever wanted to receive it.
The others turned their heads toward her.
Martha looked at the sand. Then at the net. Then back at them.
"Next time..."
She hesitated. Just briefly. The old hesitation — the one she'd had on day one, the one that showed up whenever she was about to say something she actually wanted.
Then she let it go.
"I'm joining," she said. And this time it came out the way she meant it.
Nobody had a chance to respond.
Erica's arm extended upward from where she was lying without any preamble or ceremony. Her hand found Martha's wrist.
"Ah—"
She pulled.
Martha landed in the sand between Leon and Raymond with a sound that was approximately the sound of a person arriving somewhere unexpectedly but not entirely unwillingly. Her notebook went sideways. Her pencil rolled away. Her hair was in her face.
She pushed it aside.
She was lying in the sand with four other people looking up at the sky, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone who had made the correct decision.
The group burst into laughter again — softer this time, more comfortable, the laughter of people who knew each other well enough to share a moment like this without it needing to mean anything more than exactly what it was.
Nobody spoke.
They simply lay there, five cadets in military uniforms covered in sand and sweat, staring at an afternoon sky that was doing nothing in particular except existing, which was enough.
The cedar trees bent in the wind.
The distant sound of drilling continued its rhythm across the base.
The NW breeze moved across the court, carrying the smell of grass and sea and the faint lingering dust from where the ball had been.
###############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
The footsteps, when they came, were different.
Not soft. Not careful. These were footsteps that had been trained into a specific quality over decades — the kind that carried a whole career in their cadence. The kind that made every soldier within earshot automatically aware of them, even the ones who were currently lying on the ground.
Two pairs.
The cadets didn't need to look up to know.
But they looked up anyway.
Captain Rogers and Sergeant Major Barnes stood at the edge of the training ground, looking down at the five first-year Naturals arranged in the sand like something a tide had brought in. Barnes had his arms folded. Rogers had his hands loosely at his sides.
They took in the scene — the rope court, the regulation-ish net that was slightly more high-quality than the rest of their equipment had any right to be, the fragments of leather scattered across the ground near the center of the court, the five cadets in various states of horizontal.
Rogers's mouth moved. The expression that arrived in his eyes was the one that appeared when something had surprised him in a way he found genuinely pleasant.
A smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"It seems," he said, "you're having fun.
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Give me all your stones, I swear, I can take them.