An arrogant cadet tried to block a quiet female recruit on the training range, completely unaware she was an elite operative in disguise.

Lance leaned against the cold corrugated metal of the shed wall, his face burning under the collective gaze of his peers. He could feel the eyes of the squad shifting between him and Olivia—silent, mocking, destabilizing. His fragile hierarchy was crumbling in real-time, and his mind scrambled for a purchase, any narrative that could salvage his standing.

He forced a wet, brittle chuckle from his throat.

"Anybody can get lucky once," Lance said aloud, his voice unnaturally loud, echoing off the high tin ceiling. He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to project casual dismissiveness, though his hands were trembling slightly against his ribcage. "Rifle pins get loose after thirty guys cycle through them. Half the detents on these beaters are worn down smooth. Any idiot can slap together worn-out training junk if the tolerances are shot."

A few of the recruits shifted nervously, but not one person laughed. The silence was absolute, heavy, and suffocating.

Olivia didn't give him the charity of a glance. She treated his voice like ambient engine noise outside the hangar.

With Harris standing three feet to her left, his arms folded behind his back, Olivia stepped back up to the workstation. Under protocol, following a timed field-strip, the recruit was required to run an immediate secondary diagnostic cycle—cycling the action three times, checking the extractor tension manually, and prepping the weapon for the next candidate in the queue.

She extended her right hand, her fingers closing lightly around the rifle's handguard, while her left hand reached for the charging handle to conduct the clearing sweep.

Her hand stopped.

It was not a dramatic pause; her fingers simply ceased all movement, hovering two millimeters off the latch.

Her eyes, which had been relaxed and focused downward, suddenly narrowed. Her entire posture changed. The quiet, relaxed athletic stance she had held vanished, replaced by an acute, predatory stillness that made Lieutenant Harris immediately cock his head.

She didn't cycle the weapon.

Instead, Olivia reached out with her bare index finger and touched the side of the upper receiver, directly below the ejection port door. She moved her finger an eighth of an inch, feeling the microscopic drag of metal across her skin. Then, she placed her thumb against the forward assist plunger, applying perhaps two ounces of pressure—not enough to engage the pawl, just enough to test the spring’s return rate.

A subtle, nearly imperceptible furrow appeared between her brows.

Harris leaned in. His voice was low, meant only for her ears, stripped of disciplinary veneer. "What is it?"

Olivia didn't answer right away. Her movements were now slow, deliberate, and extraordinarily delicate—the exact opposite of the lightning-fast violence she had displayed fifty seconds earlier.

She reached for the rear takedown pin. She didn't pop it with a blow; she pressed it out with a steady, surgical push. She swung the upper receiver forward on its front pivot pin. She did not remove the bolt carrier group completely. Instead, she slid it backward just three inches, until the bolt head emerged from the barrel extension.

She turned the receiver sideways, angling the bolt toward the pale halogen light.

Her fingers dipped into the carrier channel. She didn't use a tool. Using only the fingernails of her thumb and middle finger, she reached deep into the recessed face of the bolt assembly, hunting along the tiny, intricate perimeter of the extractor claw.

There was a faint, nearly silent *tink*—not the sound of a mil-spec component functioning under spring tension, but the sound of brittle, unseated metal slipping against an edge.

Olivia slowly withdrew her hand.

Between her thumb and forefinger, she held a tiny, blackened piece of machined steel, no larger than the head of a matchstick. It was an altered extractor retaining pin, but its shaft had been meticulously scored around its circumference with a jeweler’s file, and the tiny rubber O-ring damper that should have cushioned the extractor spring had been split down the center with a razor blade.

Under manual dry-fire assembly, the weapon worked fine. But under the live chamber pressures of the automated training rounds set for the next phase, that scored pin would have sheared instantly on the first round fired.

The bolt would have locked solid inside the barrel extension, driving the extractor claw into the locking lugs and inducing a catastrophic, out-of-battery stoppage that would have detonated the casing, spraying high-pressure brass fragments and hot gas directly back through the ejection port—straight into the face and eyes of whoever held the weapon.