Chapter Five: Black Zone Simulation

In the corridor outside, other freshmen were already running. Someone muttered as he passed. "That's him." "The one who put Calder down yesterday." "Astra-X is not a training frame. Winning with it was unfair." Leon ignored them. He knew defeating one person would not silence everyone. It would only make more people want to prove they had seen him lose. The Seventh Simulation War Zone was buried deep in the academy's inner ring. It was not an ordinary training field. It was a giant war table capable of reproducing cities, canyons, orbital ports, and low-gravity ruins. Tens of thousands of projection nodes hung beneath the ceiling, and the ground was built from mobile armor modules.