Three strikes and you're dead.

The Academy's rules are simple: survive the trials, follow protocol, become a knight. Peter's problem? Someone has rewritten the rules to ensure he never makes it out alive.

Strange glitches plague the neural-link simulations. Sponsor-funded cadets mysteriously outperform those without backing. Then people start dying—their minds fried by feedback surges that shouldn't be possible.

Peter's frontier ingenuity has kept his squad alive through trials designed to break them. Now something hidden in the system is learning their tactics, predicting their moves, turning their own training against them. Each simulation brings new dangers. Each victory teaches their enemy how to kill them better.

As the digital hunter closes in, Peter must choose between the career he's fought for or the friends he'll die for. In a place where excellence makes you a target, survival means breaking every rule they taught him.

Will Peter's salvage-yard tactics outsmart an enemy that evolves with every encounter? Can loyalty triumph when the Academy itself wants you dead? Start reading now to discover if determination beats design.

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