by Riven Cross
War no longer belongs to nations.It belongs to students. At Helix Academy, elite youths are trained through live-fire “Operations” where failure isn’t graded—it’s erased. Every mission updates their rankings, their value, and how disposable they are. The Operational Assessment Framework—known simply as the Board—tracks survival probability, combat usefulness, and psychological compatibility with killing. What it doesn’t explain is what happens to those who score too high. When an average student with no talent for violence is ranked for elimination, he survives not by pulling the trigger—but by learning how the system thinks. Each operation keeps him alive and strips something human away. There are no respawns.Only rankings.And the quiet question of whether surviving the system is worse than dying in it.
