The Ascent of Olympus Mons
The ascent of Olympus Mons was supposed to be a test of endurance, but on the second night, the Martian sky didn't turn blue—it turned a bruised, sickly violet.
A Martian Dust Storm, supercharged by the thinning atmosphere and static electricity, roared across the Tharsis plateau like a living beast.
The wind screamed at speeds exceeding 180 km/h, carrying abrasive silicate dust that shredded the students' standard thermal gear like industrial sandpaper.
Kaelen anchored his team, his thick threads boring into the volcanic basalt like industrial drills, the vibrations traveling up his spine.
"Hold on!" Kaelen roared over the gale, his voice barely audible against the atmospheric screech. "Leo, Sora, get behind me! Mina, stay in the center of the thread-loop!"
The students huddled together, their visors flickering with static as the storm's electromagnetic interference began to scramble their short-range comms.
But as the visibility dropped to zero, a rhythmic clatter of iron on stone—heavy, deliberate, and alien—pierced the howl of the storm.
The Breach
Through the swirling red haze, a jagged rift in space—a Gate—flickered into existence, bleeding a cold, unnatural darkness into the Martian night.
It was an unstable tear, a scouting portal opened by the Orcs, a brutal sub-species of the Void-touched who thrived in the chaos of collapsing realities.
They stepped out—four hundred hulking brutes, smelling of rotten meat and ozone, wielding jagged cleavers and rusted maces that hummed with a sick light.
The 400 students of the third-year class were spread across the scarp, isolated in small pockets of desperate survival as the first wave of monsters hit.
Professor Andrew and Elena detected the energy spike instantly from the command center, the monitors screaming with "Level 4 Gate" warnings.
"Kaelen! Hold the line!" Andrew's voice crackled through the neural links, distorted by the rift's interference. "We are inbound, but you are on your own for twelve minutes!"
Twelve minutes. On a mountain where seconds were measured in liters of blood and failing oxygen levels.
The Visceral Clash
The Orc leader, a three-meter-tall slab of scarred muscle, lunged at Kaelen, his footsteps cracking the ancient volcanic rock.
His rusted cleaver hummed with a filthy, greenish energy that seemed to eat the very light around it.
Kaelen didn't retreat; he centered his weight, using the Veyron Pulsar footing to lock his skeletal structure into the planet itself.
His boots exploded into the Martian soil as he drove his bare forearm upward to meet the falling blade in a suicidal parry.
CLANG.
The sound was like a hammer hitting an anvil, a shockwave that cleared the dust in a three-meter radius.
The cleaver notched against Kaelen's skin, held back by the sheer density of his Level 50 threads and the molecular reinforcement of his Veyron bloodline.
His training suit tore at the shoulder, revealing skin glowing with a faint, angry crimson light as his internal core overclocked to compensate for the pressure.
Kaelen roared, pulling his arm back and delivering a compacted straight punch directly into the Orc's massive, rusted chestplate.
The impact bypassed the iron, sending a kinetic shockwave through its torso that liquefied internal organs and sprayed green ichor from its mouth.
A Battlefield of Gore
Behind him, the scene was a nightmare of flashing steel and desperate, youthful screams.
Leo was a whirlwind of golden energy, his movements a blur of practiced violence as he intercepted a spear mid-thrust.
He snapped the heavy shaft with his bare hands and, in one fluid motion, drove the jagged wood into the creature's throat, pinning it to the basalt.
Sora moved with lethal, predatory speed, using wind-sharpened kicks to slice through the Orcs' thick hides and tendons.
She landed a spinning heel kick on a scout's neck, the force spinning its head nearly 180 degrees with a wet, sickening snap.
Mina acted as the tactical anchor, her blue threads whipping through the dust like microscopic razor-wire.
She caught an Orc's charging arm, and as she pulled back with the force of a hydraulic press, the thread severed the limb at the bicep in a spray of dark fluid.
The fight was gruesome; the lack of oxygen meant every breath was a struggle, and every wound was an immediate death sentence in the freezing thin air.
A junior student to Kaelen's left screamed as an Orc's serrated blade sheared through his leg at the knee, the suit's internal sealant failing instantly.
Kaelen watched the boy collapse, his blood turning the snow-white Martian dust into a dark, steaming crimson that froze almost as soon as it hit the ground.
Another student, a quiet girl named Ela, was caught by a heavy iron mace that crushed her ribs and sent her flying into the lightless void of the storm.
The Mountain's Fury
Fury erupted in Kaelen's core, a cold, calculating rage that pushed aside his fear and exhaustion.
He stopped thinking and let Redveil take the wheel of his "Secondary Computing," his movements becoming eerily precise and mechanical.
He ducked under a wide swing from the Leader, the wind of the blade whistling past his ear, and stepped deep into the brute's guard.
He delivered a brutal knee to its groin followed by an elbow that shattered the creature's tusks into a cloud of white shrapnel.
The Orc leader grabbed Kaelen's head, its massive, filth-encrusted fingers digging into his scalp with enough pressure to crack a helmet.
Blood trickled down Kaelen's forehead, stinging his eyes, but he didn't flinch; he simply grabbed the Orc's wrists.
CRUNCH.
The Orc's wrist bones turned to powder under the tightening grip of Kaelen's high-tension threads.
Kaelen then leaped, putting his entire mass—amplified by his Star-Silver core—into a falling axe-kick that landed squarely on the leader's collarbone.
The bone snapped, the jagged shard piercing the creature's lung and sending it into a coughing fit of black-green bile.
Around them, the 400 students were fighting in clusters of three and four, a sea of torn suits, broken limbs, and desperate cries.
One Orc was systematically torn apart by a group of five students who had synchronized their threads into a makeshift, rotating meat-grinder.
With a final, guttural snarl, Kaelen lunged forward, grabbing the Orc leader's head and driving his thumb into the creature's eye socket.
He delivered a final, high-density punch to the throat, crushing the windpipe and ending the leader's life in the red sand.
The End of the Trial
When the Professors finally arrived, descending from the sky like vengeful gods in their gleaming suits, the Gate had flickered out.
The storm began to die down, leaving behind a silent, haunted battlefield of red dust and alien gore.
They found a battlefield of 400 exhausted, bloodied children standing amidst the corpses of monsters.
Kaelen stood at the front, his suit in tatters, his knuckles showing white bone, and his body steaming in the sub-zero Martian air.
He was breathing heavily, his Crimson Threads still humming with the residue of the slaughter.
The assessment was ended immediately, the "test" having turned into a massacre that no one was truly prepared for.
Medical shuttles descended to gather the wounded, their sirens wailing against the thin Martian atmosphere.
While the technology could regrow the lost limbs of the thirty students who had been maimed, the eyes of the survivors had changed forever.
"You passed," Andrew said quietly, looking at the broken bodies of the Orcs and then at the boy who had held them back.
"All of you. You've faced the Void with nothing but your hands and your heart."
The third year was over, and the legend of the Veyron was no longer just a name—it was a scar on the surface of Mars.