The following morning, Auxiliary Squad 4 assembled in their newly assigned private training hall in the basement of the Administration Building. The facility was vast, subterranean, and vastly superior to the rusted, broken barracks on the outer perimeter. High-density impact padding lined the reinforced concrete walls, and advanced target simulators—equipped with adaptive kinetic barriers—stood ready in the center ring.
Jax stood in the middle of the floor, holding his newly repaired kite shield. The cracked alloy face had been completely stripped and replaced with a heavy, tungsten-plated steel shell funded directly by the merit credits they had received from the Dread-Tusk core retrieval. He shifted his weight, testing the balance, while heat shimmered softly from the frame's heat-sink channels.
At the far end of the range, Lyra stood with a brand-new, Tier-2 silver focus rod. Her fingers glided smoothly over the active touch-controls as she channeled her internal power. A series of three amber energy bolts erupted from the tip in rapid succession, striking moving target drones across the room with absolute, pinpoint precision.
When Caine opened the heavy acoustic door and stepped into the room, both Jax and Lyra stopped what they were doing immediately.
An awkward, heavy silence hung in the air, punctuated only by the low cooling fans of the target simulators.
"Hey," Jax said, breaking the silence as he lowered his shield onto the floor with a dull thud. He looked at Caine with a complex mixture of profound respect and lingering nervousness. "The Enforcers cleared our deployment logs this morning. We each got twenty thousand merit credits deposited directly into our student accounts."
"Good," Caine said, walking over to the weapon rack and selecting a standard wooden practice sword to check its balance. "You earned it. You held the line at the sub-station."
Lyra lowered her focus rod, walking across the polished training floor to stand directly before him. Her hazel eyes were sharp, observant, and completely clear of any remaining doubt or hesitation.
"We didn't earn it, Caine," Lyra said firmly, her voice echoing off the training hall walls. "You saved our lives at the water treatment facility. You took down Julian's squad alone, and you gave us a cover story that protected all of us from the Enforcers and the Marcus Syndicate."
Caine paused, holding the wooden sword in a neutral guard. "Lyra—"
"I don't care about your official rating, Caine," Lyra interrupted gently, her tone resolute. "I don't care if your CHPower is 10, 50, or something the Academy doesn't even have a name for. You protected us when Section 1 tried to execute us in the dark. Jax and I talked it over yesterday... whatever power you're holding back, its secret is safe with Squad 4."
Jax nodded heavily, pounding his right fist against his broad chest armor. "Damn right. Squad 4 sticks together. You kept my defective core a secret, you kept Lyra's low output off the official record, and we keep yours. That's how a real squad operates."
Caine looked at both of them. For two years, he had survived as an invisible ghost in Sector 7, dismissed as a failure by his peers and ignored by his instructors. Having allies who knew the truth—who understood the sheer scale of the danger they were facing and still chose to stand beside him—was a feeling he hadn't experienced since his father's passing.
"All right," Caine said, a small, genuine smile appearing on his face as he placed the wooden sword back onto the rack. "Then we train. The Inter-Sector Ranking Tournament starts in three weeks, and Director Thorne has officially placed Auxiliary Squad 4 in the main bracket."
"The main bracket?" Jax groaned, his hands dropping to his sides. "That means we'll have to fight standard Section 1 and Section 2 squads in front of ten thousand spectators!"
"Which means," Lyra added, her hazel eyes flashing with a fierce, competitive flame, "we finally get to show the rest of this Academy that the Auxiliary Vanguard isn't a dumping ground."
For the rest of the day, the three of them ran synchronized drills, establishing tactical calls, defensive overlaps, and energy distribution strategies designed to maximize Jax's thermal wall and Lyra's long-range binds while keeping Caine's explosive physical density hidden until the critical moment.