CHAPTER 66: DON’T OVERTHINK

The creature charged. Ahce waited until the very last moment, the instant before death, and then dove forward, sliding beneath the beast’s belly. As she moved, she thrust her saber upward with all her strength, channeling the residual energy from her bracelet. The blade plunged deep into its flesh, right under the ribs. The air was filled with the crackling sound of lightning discharging.

A shockwave erupted, and Ahce was thrown backward, landing hard on the ground. Her ears rang. Smoke rose from the beast’s wound. It howled, stumbling forward, its heavy weight collapsing into the loose ground she had weakened earlier. The earth gave way. The beast crashed into the pit with a deafening roar.

Ahce struggled to her feet, clutching her saber, eyes burning with focus. She limped to the edge and saw it still twitching, trying to rise. Without hesitation, she grabbed a nearby rock the size of her head and hurled it into its open wound, forcing the saber deeper. The boar gave one last shudder before falling still.

Silence.

Only the faint hum of the drone remained. For a moment, Ahce simply stood there, breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling. Her hands trembled, the metallic taste of blood on her tongue. The smell of burnt fur and earth filled the air. She wiped sweat from her brow and stared down at the massive beast.

"Looks like... you’re dinner tonight." She gave a small, exhausted grin.

The galaxy-wide chat erupted in chaos.

[She killed it! She actually killed it!]

[Unbelievable! A freshman just took down a tier-six!]

[Who IS this girl?]

Starnet’s trending list exploded with her ID number. News outlets across several planets replayed the footage on loop. Commentators debated her techniques, her impossible calm, her strange intuition.

Meanwhile, Ahce remained oblivious to all of it. She was too busy figuring out how to butcher something that weighed two tons. By dawn, she had skinned a portion of the beast, using her saber to slice through layers of muscle and hide. She gathered some of the cleanest meat and smoked it near her unfinished hut. The rest she buried deep to prevent scavengers from coming.

When she finally sat down, her hands were raw, and her body ached all over. But there was a quiet satisfaction in her chest. She looked at the sunrise, golden light spilling across the wild forest, and smiled faintly. Her first kill. Her first victory.

Unbeknownst to her, she had just rewritten the academy’s history. Never before had a freshman from the Plant Engineering Department ranked first on the Orion military training leaderboard. Her name, Ahce Qin, glowed across the interstellar broadcast screens, above the words:

[#1 — Longest Surviving Freshman | Most Dangerous Beast Killed | 2,384,211 Viewers Live]

But in that quiet morning, she only saw the sky, heard the rustling wind, and thought to herself.

"Another day to survive."

In the depths of the interstellar night, while Ahce slept soundly inside her unfinished hut on Planet Rhino, far away in the heart of the Empire’s capital, her name had already spread like wildfire.

Every major Starnet channel was replaying her battle with the five-horned boar. Commentators analyzed her form, her calm under pressure, her near-suicidal strategy that somehow led to victory. They slowed down frames of her movements, highlighting her footwork and precision. She had moved like a seasoned fighter, not a freshman from the Plant Engineering Department.

But it wasn’t only her strength that drew attention. It was her surname.

Once her drone ID was verified by the academy’s server, data analysts and bored netizens dug deeper. Within hours, her full name surfaced on the public network. Ahce Yuzhou Qin, the daughter of the prestigious Qin Clan of the Orion Galaxy.

The Qin Clan. A lineage of brilliance and loyalty.

Known as one of the "Four Pillars" of the Empire, the Qin family had served the royal bloodline for generations, strategists, scientists, and generals who shaped galactic policy and defended the crown from rebellion after rebellion.

They were known for producing prodigies, people whose genetic aptitude ratings were in the top one percent of the population. And now, another had emerged.

[Wait... Qin? She’s from that family?]

[The one whose descendants built the neural interface technology?]

[Didn’t her brothers, Amiel and Alexander, both work on the Optical Brain project?]

[So she’s one of the heirs of the Qin research branch?]

[But I thought Alexander Qin was working in the military!]

[You’re news is outdated!]

As the threads multiplied, old images resurfaced, photos of her as a child, standing beside her brothers during a family ceremony. Even though she had been gone from the capital for years, her face was unmistakable. Ahce had become an overnight sensation. The quiet, diligent girl who caught and cooked a chicken had now become the Empire’s latest obsession.

Her livestream’s viewership tripled. People tuned in not only to watch her survive, but to watch the young heiress of a legendary house live in mud, fight beasts, and sleep in a makeshift hut with her saber by her side. The Empire had seen many academy broadcasts before, but none as magnetic as hers.

-

In the northern quadrant of the capital, within a fortress of steel and glass that overlooked the starports, a young man sat in his office. The insignia of a marshal gleamed on his uniform, and a digital display projected several live feeds across his desk. One of them, Ahce’s stream, played silently in front of him.

He was tall, sharp-featured, his presence radiating the kind of authority that could command an entire fleet with a single order. His name was Eros Arthur Yin, the youngest marshal in the history of the Orion Military Federation. At twenty-two, he commanded the Northern Command Center, an achievement that placed him in the same rank as generals twice his age.

But at this moment, he wasn’t reading a battle report or commanding a division. He was watching a girl roast chicken over a fire.

His aide, Kevin, leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, an amused smile on his face. "You’ve been staring at that feed for an hour, Marshal. Planning to analyze her fighting stance again?"

Eros didn’t respond immediately. His gaze stayed fixed on the screen, where Ahce’s tired but content smile reflected the firelight.

"She’s reckless," he finally said. "The way she baited that boar, she could have died."