Chapter 36: Zone
The four buses for Group 1 drove in a loose convoy for about an hour and forty minutes before the road stopped being a road.
It became a dirt track wide enough for one vehicle, cutting through dense forest on a steady incline. The buses slowed. Through the window Leon could occasionally catch gaps in the trees — steep terrain dropping away to the left, the shape of a valley somewhere below. The sky was overcast and the light was flat.
At 11:20 the convoy stopped.
Not at anything in particular. Just a point in the track where a cluster of security officers were stationed, standing around two flatbed vehicles loaded with equipment cases. One of them flagged the buses down.
"Off here," said the officer at the front of Leon's bus. "Take everything with you."
They filtered out onto the track. The air was noticeably colder than the clearing had been, and smelled of wet earth and pine. Leon could hear a river somewhere, though he couldn't see it. He pulled his jacket tighter and looked around while the rest of the buses emptied behind them.
A hundred students on a narrow dirt track made for a crowded few minutes. People were pulling packs on, checking phones, talking in low voices. The buses idled and then reversed carefully back down the track the way they'd come.
The security officers near the flatbeds started distributing CPP bands — thicker than the standard academy ones, with a live counter on the face. Leon held his wrist out and an officer snapped his on and scanned it. The display lit up. 68 total, 47 available, 21 locked. He'd seen the numbers enough times that they didn't feel new, but seeing them on his wrist rather than his phone was different.
Emma was having hers fitted two people over. Her band read 61.
The supervisor who'd been at the clearing raised his voice to carry over the group.
"Welcome to Zone 1-C. Your zone covers approximately forty square kilometers of mixed coastal and highland terrain. The contract depot is at grid point 7-North, marked on the zone map now loading to your bands." A brief pause. "Depot opens at 0600 tomorrow. Contracts available on a first-registered basis. Band functions are live as of now — CPP tracking, contract registration, monitoring. All rules are in the full document on your band. Read them before tomorrow morning if you haven't already."
He stepped back. That was it.
The group stood there for a moment, then started moving. Clusters peeling off in different directions, some already heading north toward what the map showed as the depot. A few people moving with the particular purpose of people who'd made a plan on the bus.
Leon got the zone map up. Steep terrain on the eastern side, flatter coastal ground to the west, the river running roughly north-south through the middle. Contract depot at the top of a ridge. He zoomed out to get the full shape of it.
"What are you thinking," Emma said beside him.
"Depot's forty minutes uphill minimum. I wouldn't try today."
"Neither would I." She was looking at her own band. "Somewhere to sleep first."
The sky to the west had thickened since they'd gotten off the bus and the temperature had dropped just from standing still. Leon pulled up the zone map again and found what looked like an elevation shelf about twenty minutes east. If there was rock overhang it was better than open forest.
"This way," he said.
They started walking.
The forest floor was uneven — roots and loose stone under a layer of pine needles that made it easy to miss your footing. Emma moved steadily beside him without talking. After a few minutes they passed a pair of third-year students heading the other direction. One of them glanced at their bands briefly. Neither said anything.
The elevation shelf was better than expected. A long horizontal ledge of rock about two meters high, with a natural overhang where the layers had split apart. Dry underneath. Ground was sandy rock. Leon tested the depth — enough for two people to sleep out of rain.
"This works," Emma said.
They set their packs down. Leon did a slow circuit of the immediate area — checked the sight lines, found that the river sound was coming from directly north, meaning fresh water wasn't far. He came back and sat against the rock face.
Emma had her pack open and was going through the supply kit carefully. She pulled each item out, checked it, set it aside.
"Seven days of food if you're conservative," she said when she got to the rations. "Less if you're climbing a lot."
"We'll supplement. F-contracts include resource gathering."
She nodded and kept unpacking.
Leon opened the full rules document on his band. He'd read it twice already in the weeks before departure but the supervisor had said to read it again, and there was nothing else useful to do right now.
He went through it slowly.
The base CPP rules were the same as what had been announced — win a fight, plus ten. Lose, minus twenty. Rank modifiers stacking on top. Contracts ranging from F at five CPP up to B at twenty-five. The thirty percent elimination cut on Day 7 with the automatic minus forty on top of wherever you landed. The Harvest Mode provision for incapacitated participants, which he still found difficult to look at directly as a written rule.
Emma had finished her inventory and come to sit beside him. She was reading her own band screen.
"The contract stealing mechanic," she said after a minute. "Ten seconds of contact while someone's conscious, three while unconscious. That's — a lot of what's going to happen in the last two days is just going to be people hunting contracts rather than completing new ones."
"Probably. Easier than climbing to the depot."
"Which is why you pick up contracts early and keep moving." She scrolled down. "Did you read the Challenge clause?"
Leon found it in his document.
Article 9 — Formal Challenge. Any participant may issue a Formal Challenge to another participant within the same group. The challenged participant has sixty minutes to accept or decline. Declining forfeits fifteen CPP to the challenger immediately, transferred automatically. Accepting initiates a sanctioned fight under standard CPP rules.
"That part I knew," Emma said. "It's the second part."
Leon kept reading.
Prior to an accepted challenge, both parties may agree to include an Obligation Token as part of the wager. An Obligation Token is a conditional agreement, recorded and enforced by the band system. The token specifies one action the losing participant must perform within a defined timeframe. Failure to fulfill a registered Obligation Token results in an automatic thirty CPP penalty, applied immediately upon expiry. The action specified in a token may include: vacating a defined territory, transferring a completed contract, sharing live band location data for a period not exceeding forty-eight hours, or completing a specified task on behalf of the winning participant. Obligation Tokens cannot require actions that constitute direct physical harm to a third party.
He read it again.
"So you can fight someone and instead of just taking CPP you can make them owe you something," Emma said.
"Or make them show you where they've been."
"Or clear an area you want." She looked up from her band. "Or force someone to complete a contract for you and then steal it off them once they're done."
Leon considered that. The sixty-minute acceptance window meant you could also use a Challenge to pressure someone into moving — if they were sitting on a resource or position you wanted, issue the challenge, and even if they accepted rather than paid the fifteen CPP, you'd disrupted whatever they were doing.
"It's designed to be used in a lot of ways," he said.
"Yeah."
They both went back to reading.
The rest of the document was mostly what he already knew. One exception he hadn't paid attention to before — Article 14, a brief clause near the bottom.
Participants whose CPP reaches zero prior to the Day 7 cutoff may invoke Witness status and declare themselves a witness. To do so, they must transfer all of their remaining CPP — including the locked registration amount — to one other active participant of their choice. Once declared, the Witness loses all right to continue participating in the tournament and permanently forfeits any rank-related privileges. There is no reversal.
What they receive in exchange: if a declared Witness provides firsthand testimony about any rules violation, death, or misconduct they personally observed during Phase One, that testimony is legally binding in any post-tournament Academy Board proceeding. It does not go through the standard review process. It goes directly to a binding arbitration panel and cannot be dismissed or buried without a full council vote — meaning no single person in the administration can make it disappear.
Witness status can only be invoked once and cannot be taken back after declaration.
He'd glossed over it before. He read it again more carefully.
"That one's strange," Emma said. She'd clearly just reached the same article.
"It would only apply to someone who's already at zero."
"Which at that point — losing all your locked CPP on top of everything and forfeiting your rank permanently." She shook her head. "I can't imagine the situation where that trade makes sense."
"Unless whatever you witnessed was serious enough."
She looked at him briefly, then back at the screen. "I suppose."
He scrolled back up to the contract tiers and went through them once more. F at five, E at eight, D at twelve, C at eighteen, B at twenty-five. The B contract was one per group, hidden, solo completion, two continuous hours at the location, resetting every forty-eight hours if unclaimed. The reset timer was new information — he hadn't fully registered it before. If nobody found it in the first two days it would shift location.
"Did you see where the C-rank contracts are?" he asked.
Emma pulled up her screen. "It says the nature of C-rank contracts will be disclosed at the depot. Not listed in advance."
“Okay“
Voices drifted down from above — two or three students moving along the top of the shelf. They passed without stopping. Leon listened until the footsteps faded north.
It was just past noon. Depot opened at 0600 tomorrow morning. Fourteen hours, roughly.
Emma closed the rules document and looked at the zone map instead. She was quiet for a bit.
“Jay’s on the other side of the range,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Have you looked at Group 6’s zone? It’s mostly flat. Less climbing.”
“Easier terrain.”
“He’d say that’s worse because there’s nowhere to hide.” She set her band down. “Well, he has survived this academy for three years now alongside me. He’ll be alright.”
She put her wrist down and picked up her water bottle, checked the filter cap, slid it back into her pack's side pocket.
Somewhere in the forest above them a bird made a sound and stopped.