The smell was the first thing that hit you. It wasn't just "trash"—it was the scent of rotting meat, burnt plastic, and chemical waste all cooked together under a smoggy sky.
In the Northern Sector, if you were a screw-up, you didn't get a fancy bus ride to your future. You got the "reclamation Hauler." Basically, a massive, rusted-out garbage truck with bars on the tiny windows.
"Get in, you little shits!" the guard screamed. He wasn't wearing a clean uniform. It was stained with grease and what looked like dried blood. He slammed his electrified baton against the side of the metal hull. CLANG. The sound made everyone jump. About thirty teenagers were standing in the mud, shivering. Some had black eyes. One guy was missing a shoe. These weren't the main characters of some epic story; they were the leftovers. The thugs who got caught, the orphans who fought back, and the ones who just didn't fit into the "Perfect Citizen" program.
"Move it! Or I'll let the rats have you!"
A tall kid with a jagged scar across his nose spat on the ground and climbed up the ladder. The rest followed like sheep to a slaughterhouse.
Inside the back of the truck, there were no seats. Just cold metal floorboards and a layer of grime that felt sticky under your boots. There was one bucket in the corner. That was the toilet. For thirty people.
"This is a joke," a girl muttered, tucking a piece of greasy blue hair behind her ear. "My brother told me the Academy had mechs. This looks like a tomb."
"Shut up, Blue," a voice hissed from the shadows. "If you're in this truck, it means the city gave up on you. Just hope they feed us."
The engine roared to life with a sound like a dying monster. The whole truck vibrated so hard it made your teeth ache. As they pulled out of the Sector, the small grated windows showed the world outside.
It was disgusting.
The "Dead Zone" started just past the city walls. It wasn't just a desert; it was a graveyard of the old world. You could see mountains of crushed cars that stretched for miles. Yellow fog hugged the ground—acid rain runoff that never evaporated. Every now and then, you'd see a scavenger—a person so mutated and thin they looked like a walking skeleton—digging through the heaps for a scrap of copper.
"Look," one kid whispered, pointing out the grate.
In the distance, something huge moved. It had too many legs and looked like it was made of shadows and wet leather. A "Crawl." The military usually hunted them with drones, but out here? Out here, the Crawls were the kings.
Inside the truck, the heat started to build. The air got thick with the smell of sweat and unwashed bodies.
"Hey, give me your boots," a massive guy said, standing up. He was at least six-foot-five, with knuckles that looked like they'd been broken a hundred times. He was looking at a smaller, skinny kid in the corner.
The skinny kid trembled. "N-no. I need them."
The big guy laughed. It wasn't a nice sound. "You're at the Academy now, rat. There are no rules here. Only what I take."
He lunged. But before he could grab the kid, a heavy metal pipe—probably ripped from the truck's wall—slammed into the floor between them.
"Sit down," a girl said. She was sitting in the darkest corner, her face hidden by a hood. She hadn't moved since they got on. "The vibration is giving me a headache. If you start a fight, I'll use this pipe to make sure you never walk again."
The big guy looked at the pipe, then at the girl's eyes. They weren't scared. They were bored. He grumbled and sat back down.
The Arrival
After six hours of bouncing over potholes and breathing in exhaust fumes, the truck finally hissed to a stop.
The heavy back doors groaned open. The sunlight—if you could call that dim, grey glow "sunlight"—blinded them for a second.
"End of the line, maggots!"
They stumbled out, coughing and blinking.
They weren't at a school. They were in the middle of a fortress. High concrete walls topped with rusted barbed wire. Guards stood on towers with heavy machine guns pointed inward, not outward.
In the center of the muddy courtyard stood a man with a prosthetic jaw made of dull iron. He looked at them like they were bugs he wanted to step on.
"Welcome to The Academy," Iron Jaw said. His voice sounded like gravel in a blender. "The world thinks you're trash. This truck thinks you're trash. And looking at you... I think you're trash too."
He kicked a pile of wooden crates next to him. "There are twenty bunk beds in that shed. There are thirty of you. I'll let you do the math. If you're still standing outside when the sun goes down, the "Dogs" get let loose in the yard."
He turned around and started walking away.
"Wait!" the boy with the missing shoe yelled. "What about food? What about our gear?"
Iron Jaw didn't even look back. "Kill something. Or steal it. That's your first lesson."
The thirty teens looked at each other. The "friendship" of the bus ride was gone. Their eyes went to the shed. Then they went to each other's throats.
The Academy didn't start with a ceremony. It started with a riot.
The "riot" didn't start with a scream. It started with a wet thud.
The big guy from the truck—the one who wanted the boots—didn't wait for a signal. He just swung his massive fist into the side of the skinny kid's head. The kid went down like a sack of rocks, his face hitting the grey slush of the courtyard.
"My bed!" the big guy roared.
That was the trigger. It was like a dam breaking. Thirty teenagers, all of them hungry, all of them pissed off at the world, scrambled toward the wooden shed.
It wasn't a fight with honor. It was a mess of elbows, teeth, and fingernails.
Blue Hair—the girl from earlier—got kicked in the stomach by a guy with a jagged scar on his cheek. She didn't cry. she just grabbed his ankle and bit down through his boot until he screamed.
"Get off me, you bitch!" Scar-face yelled, slamming his heel into her shoulder.
The hooded girl with the metal pipe was different. She didn't run. She walked. When a guy tried to tackle her to get to the door first, she didn't even look at him. She just swung the pipe low. CRACK. The sound of a shin bone snapping echoed across the yard. The guy hit the mud, howling, clutching his leg.
She stepped over him like he was a puddle.
"Out of the way," she said. Her voice was flat. Cold. Like she'd done this a thousand times in the slums.
Inside the shed, it was even worse. The "beds" weren't beds. They were wooden planks stacked four high, covered in moldy straw. No pillows. No blankets. Just the smell of damp wood and old sweat.
"I got this one! This is mine!" a kid yelled, hugging a top bunk.
A second later, three other kids pulled him off by his hair. They started beating him on the floor, three-on-one. They weren't even looking at the beds anymore; they were just venting all the hate they had for the guards onto the easiest target they could find.
Up on the catwalks, the guards weren't stopping it. They were laughing.
One of them, a guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, leaned over the rail. "Ten credits says the big one kills at least two of 'em before lock-in!"
"No bet," the other guard grunted, checking his rifle. "The girl with the pipe is the one to watch. She's got 'Sector 4' written all over her. That's where they eat their own parents when the winter hits."
Down in the mud, the sun was dropping fast. The "grey" of the sky was turning into a bruised purple. And with the darkness came the sound.
Howl.
It wasn't a dog. It wasn't a wolf. It sounded like a woman screaming through a metal tube.
The "Dogs"
The fighting in the courtyard stopped instantly. Everyone froze. Even the big guy, who was currently choking a boy against a wall, let go.
The sound came from behind the massive iron gates at the far end of the yard. Scratch. Scratch. Scrape. Something with very long claws was pacing behind the metal.
"The Dogs," Blue Hair whispered, her face pale. She was holding her ribs, her blue hair matted with mud.
The shed only had room for twenty. There were still nearly thirty kids in the yard.
"Move! Move!" someone screamed.
The panic was real now. It wasn't about a bed anymore. It was about a door. The shed had a heavy iron bolt on the inside.
The hooded girl reached the door first. She stepped inside, her pipe dripping with someone's blood. She looked back at the crowd of desperate, bleeding teenagers.
"Twenty," she said, counting.
"Let us in! Please!" a younger girl sobbed, tripping over a piece of scrap metal.
The hooded girl didn't look sad. She didn't look happy. She just looked at the sun. The last sliver of light vanished behind the mountain of trash outside the walls.
CLANK.
The iron gates at the end of the yard swung open.
At first, you couldn't see them. Just glowing yellow eyes, low to the ground. Then, the shapes came into the light of the watchtowers. They looked like greyhounds, but their skin was gone. It was just raw muscle and bone, covered in a thin, translucent slime. They didn't have eyes—just heat-sensing pits in their snouts.
They didn't bark. They hissed.
"CLOSE THE DOOR!" the big guy screamed, shoving his way into the shed.
"Wait! I'm almost there!" Scar-face was sprinting across the mud, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He was ten feet away. Five feet.
The hooded girl grabbed the handle of the shed door.
"Sorry," she muttered.
SLAM.
The heavy wood door shut right in Scar-face's face. He pounded on it, screaming, "LET ME IN! OPEN THE—"
His voice cut off into a gurgle.
Outside, through the cracks in the shed walls, the twenty "winners" heard the sound of wet tearing. They heard the Dogs huffing as they fed. And they heard the scratching of claws against the door, trying to get to the rest of them.
Inside the dark shed, nobody spoke. Nobody fought over the beds anymore. They just sat in the dark, listening to their classmates being eaten three inches away.
The sun didn't rise the next morning. It just turned the sky from pitch black to a sickly, bruised grey.
Inside the shed, the air was thick. It smelled like twenty teenagers who hadn't showered in a week, mixed with the metallic tang of blood seeping under the door frame. Nobody had slept. Every time a floorboard creaked, someone jumped. Every time the "Dogs" outside let out a low huff, someone started sobbing quietly in the dark.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The door didn't just open; it was kicked off its hinges. The iron bolt snapped like a toothpick.
"Wakey-wakey, trash bags!"
It was Iron Jaw. He was holding a high-pressure fire hose. Before anyone could even stand up, he squeezed the trigger.
The water wasn't clean. It was freezing, recycled grey-water that smelled like bleach and sewage. It hit the kids like a physical punch, blasting them off their moldy straw beds and slamming them against the back wall.
"Out! Everyone out! Five minutes or I turn the hose on 'High' and start breaking ribs!"
They stumbled out into the courtyard, shivering and soaking wet. The cold wind bit into their skin, turning their lips blue. But as they stepped into the light, the shivering stopped. Everyone just froze.
The courtyard was a disaster zone.
The "Dogs" were gone, but they'd left their dinner behind. The mud wasn't brown anymore—it was a dark, sticky crimson. There were scraps of fabric everywhere. A blue sleeve. A sneaker with a foot still inside it.
Scar-face, the guy who had been begging at the door, was mostly just a ribcage now. The "Dogs" had picked him clean, leaving his bones white and jagged against the filth.
"Gross," Blue Hair whispered, gagging. She doubled over and threw up a thin, yellow liquid. She hadn't eaten in two days, so there wasn't much to come up.
"Pick up the shovels," Iron Jaw commanded. He pointed to a stack of rusted garden tools leaning against the wall. Next to them were several large, black plastic bins. "The Academy doesn't hire janitors. You want a clean yard? You make it clean."
The big guy—the one who had bullied everyone on the truck—looked like he was going to faint. He was staring at a hand lying near his boot. A hand he recognized.
"Move it, Meathead!" a guard barked, poking him in the kidney with an electric baton. ZAP.
The big guy yelped and grabbed a shovel.
The next three hours were a silent nightmare. The survivors shuffled through the mud, scooping up what was left of the ten kids who didn't make it inside. There was no talking. No crying. Just the wet schlop of shovels hitting the muck and the heavy thud of remains hitting the bottom of the plastic bins.
The hooded girl was the only one who didn't look sick. She worked fast, her face a mask of iron. She picked up a severed finger like it was a piece of litter and tossed it into the bin.
"You've done this before," Blue Hair said, her voice shaking as she tried to scrape blood off a stone.
The hooded girl stopped. She looked at the horizon, where the massive smoke-stacks of the city were pumping black soot into the clouds.
"In the slums, the 'Sweepers' come every night," she said quietly. "If you don't clean up the bodies, the plague rats come next. It's just work."
The Reward
Once the yard was mostly grey again, Iron Jaw walked back out. He was carrying a bucket.
"Breakfast," he said.
He tipped the bucket over. A pile of grey, gelatinous bricks fell onto a dirty wooden table. They looked like oversized bars of soap.
"Protein blocks. Made from recycled organic matter," Iron Jaw grinned, his metal jaw glinting. "Don't ask what's in 'em. Just eat. In ten minutes, we start combat trials. Anyone who vomits gets to be the 'Dogs' chew toy tonight."
The survivors stared at the grey bricks. Then they looked at the black bins full of their dead classmates.
The big guy was the first one to reach out. He grabbed a block and started shoving it into his mouth, his eyes wide and terrified. He knew the rule now.
In The Academy, you didn't have to be a hero. You just had to be the one who survived the morning.
The grey protein blocks tasted like chalk and old fish, but everyone shoved them down. If you didn't have fuel in your gut, you were just a walking corpse.
"Time's up, losers!" Iron Jaw barked. He kicked the wooden table over, sending the leftover grey bricks into the mud. "Line up. Weapons draw."
A heavy metal shutter on the side of the main building screeched open. It didn't reveal shiny rifles or humming energy blades. It was a dumping ground. Rusted pipes, serrated kitchen knives welded to rebar, heavy wrenches, and jagged sheets of metal wrapped in duct tape for handles.
"Pick one," Iron Jaw said, lighting a cheap, foul-smelling cigarette. "If it breaks while you're swinging it, that's on you. If you can't kill with a piece of scrap, you won't survive a week with a real gun."
The big guy—who someone said was named Grog—lunged for a massive, rusted sledgehammer. It was missing half its handle, but it looked heavy enough to crack a skull. Blue Hair grabbed a long, thin piece of sharpened rebar.
The hooded girl waited. She didn't rush. When the crowd cleared, she picked up a short, heavy meat cleaver that was pitted with rust. She tested the weight, her thumb running along the notched edge. It was dull, but it was heavy.
"Hey! Look at this!" A scrawny kid with thick glasses laughed, pulling out a bent bayonet. "I'm gonna be a—"
CRACK.
Iron Jaw's boot connected with the kid's ribs, sending him flying backward into the mud.
"Shut up," Iron Jaw spat. "This isn't a game. Look at the gate."
The Break
The massive iron gate—the one the Dogs had come through—started to groan. But this time, it wasn't the Dogs. It was a man.
He was wearing the same rags as the recruits, but he was twice as thin. His skin was a sickly translucent yellow, and his eyes were wide, bloodshot, and rolling in his head. He was shaking, clutching a jagged piece of glass in his hand.
"That's a 'Twitcher,'" Iron Jaw explained, blowing a cloud of smoke. "A scavenger who spent too much time in the Dead Zone. The radiation rots their brains. They don't feel pain. They just feel hungry."
The Twitcher let out a high-pitched, warbling scream. It sounded like a bird being strangled.
"No... no way," a boy near the back whimpered. His name was Leo. He was the one who had been crying all night. "I'm not doing this. I'm not a murderer! I'm just a student!"
Leo dropped his lead pipe. The clatter of metal on stone felt like a gunshot.
"I'm going home!" Leo screamed. He turned and bolted.
He didn't run for the shed. He ran for the main entrance—the gate they'd come through in the garbage truck.
"Kid, don't—" Blue Hair started to reach out, but she stopped.
The guards on the towers didn't even move their machine guns. They just watched.
Leo reached the perimeter line—a stripe of red paint on the concrete. The second his foot touched it, the air hummed.
BZZZT-POP.
A hidden turret, no bigger than a camera, tracked his movement in a millisecond. A single bolt of white-hot plasma hit Leo square in the back. There wasn't even a body to bury. Just a pair of smoking boots and a cloud of red mist that drifted away in the wind.
Iron Jaw didn't even flinch. He just looked at the Twitcher, who was now sprinting toward the group.
"First lesson," Iron Jaw said, stepping back. "Don't run. Because the gate is faster than you."
The Twitcher hit the group like a car crash.
He didn't care about the weapons. He jumped onto Grog, biting down on the big guy's shoulder. Grog roared in pain, swinging his sledgehammer wildly, but the Twitcher didn't let go. He was like a tick, burrowing in.
"Help me!" Grog screamed, his blood spraying the mud.
The others backed away. They were terrified. This wasn't a school fight. This was a slaughter.
"Do something!" Blue Hair yelled, clutching her rebar with white knuckles.
The hooded girl moved.
She didn't scream. She didn't hesitate. She stepped inside the Twitcher's reach while he was busy chewing on Grog's collarbone. She swung the heavy, rusted cleaver with both hands.
THWACK.
The blade buried itself in the side of the Twitcher's neck. Dark, oily blood—not red, but almost black—sprayed across her face.
The Twitcher didn't stop. He turned his head, snapping his teeth at her.
"Die," the girl hissed.
She yanked the blade out and slammed it down again. And again. And again.
The sound was sickening—like someone chopping wood in a swamp. Finally, the Twitcher slumped over, his head hanging by a few threads of skin.
The hooded girl stood over the body, her chest heaving. She wiped the black sludge from her eyes with the back of her hand.
The rest of the recruits looked at her like she was a monster. Iron Jaw just grinned, showing his metal teeth.
"Name?" he asked.
The girl spat a mouthful of black blood into the mud.
"Ren," she said.
"Well, Ren," Iron Jaw said, tossing his cigarette butt onto the Twitcher's corpse. "You just saved the big guy. Which means he owes you his life. And in The Academy, that's the only currency you've got."
He looked at the rest of the trembling teenagers.
"Now... who wants to go next? We've got a whole cage of 'em waiting."