Stella woke up to the electricized sound of her own heartbeat. Her eyelids trembled as she tried to make sense of the surroundings. 

"You up?" The soft and lethargic sound emerged from a blurry figure not far away from Stella. She immediately reached for her left shoulder. Thanks to the exam, our assassin had somehow managed to develop an unhealthy obsession with name tags. "Relax hot-shot. It's not there anymore."

"Is the test over?"

"What do you think?" The voice and figure belonged to a young man, but his demeanor resembled that of a 70 years-old. Stella glanced up and down, wondering if this is a result of Earth's rejuvenating tech. "This school and their lame-ass exams, the number of kids coming in unscrewed by these field tests is just abysmal."

"What happened to me?" Stella wanted to rub her eyes, before noticing a sharp pain coming from her shoulder. She then spotted the IV tube that had been needled onto her wrist and other monitoring devices attached to her chest. 

"Let's see. Dehydration. Malnourishment. Hypovolaemic shock. You also have a punctured aorta, a fractured rib and how do I ease this in? Your left shoulder is fucked." The man placed her wrist back down to the bed after the quick lecture. "What are you staring at?"

"You don't look at all like a school nurse," Stella mumbled, the effects of the stabilizer running through her veins had not been helpful to her choice of words.

"I'm a medical officer." Said the man, whose name tag glimmered in the harsh white light of sickbay. "I work with the Fleet, but we do support the Academy considering how inadequate their training systems are."

"Sugar is your name?" Stella mouthed.

"It's Suga." The medic came close and pulled on the girl's eyelids to check her pupils. Most probably out of spite.

"Ouch."

"Oh, it's uncomfortable now? And not when you tried to detach your left arm?" Suga turned off his flashlight, he then pulled out a scanning device and ran another test on her skull. "I really can't stand this generation, running around thinking that nothing has consequences anymore."

Stella couldn't clap back, she didn't belong to this era but her generation would end up being way worse than this. 

"Skull broken in half? Burnt to a crisp? Fallen from an Archaeoptetris tree? Sure, deliver them to sickbay for Dr. Min to patch up."

"I have a teammate. Is he okay?" Stella slowly moved her head left and right, only to find out that she had been in an isolated ward all this while. "His name is Jimin."

"Everyone else is fine. Not everyone is as determined to come first in this exam. And by the way, congrats." He then projected the content of his table onto the wall, which displayed a real-time ranking board. The scores from the other exams were out, and in combination with her performance in the Survival E3, Stellaris Whitlock's name was now amongst the top few in the ranking system.

"I came first ...in the Survival test?"

"You also made your rival carry you all the way back to base." Said Suga as he ran yet another test on her abdomen. "Although he might have worsened your ruptured aorta. You were pretty much a corpse upon delivery."

"Hah." Stella was sure that both Reds still had their name tags intact when she collapsed. It was hard to believe that these single-minded pricks could compromise their agendas for an unconscious girl. "Didn't see that coming."

"Didn't see what coming?" Said the boy who had just walked in, followed by his friend who looked significantly more relieved. "That unlike you, we are actually decent beings?"

The sight of V somehow unlocked scattered memories from the exam. It was as if she could still feel his soft hair brushing against her face, his wide shoulder, how stable his pacing was. 

"Thank you." She said, lamenting the lost opportunity of plunging a knife into his exposed back at the first chance she got. 

"You have this guy to thank." The curly-haired boy pushed his roommate to the front. "He managed to convince us that you deserve first place."

"Well, she was behind the plan wasn't she?" Smiled Jimin. "I wouldn't have been able to go that far if it wasn't for you, Stella."

"Oh, it is not me." Stella chuckled. She tried to fight back the effects coming from the painkillers. "Even if I wasn't here, you guys would still go pretty far."

She then almost threw her head back laughing. "Well, in life that is, not in this test though, you both sucked the first time around."

"Doctor, is she..." V didn't finish the sentence but instead brought his finger up to make a circular motion near his temple. "She did fall back and hit her head a couple of times when I dragged her here."

"You broke her Taehyung." Jimin bit his fingernails. "I told you to be more gentle."

"We will chat later about how to handle a wounded comrade." Said Suga, his eyes rolled back before changing the setting of Stella's bed. "She is under a lot of medications right now, your friend will be fine after sleeping for a couple of hours."

"She's not our..."

"Thank you, doctor," Jimin said, pulling his friend away before the other could finish his sentence. "We will give her some rest."

Stella wanted to wave at the boys, but Suga tucked her hand back to her bed. "Looks like everything is intact and all, I will be putting you in accelerated healing. Easy now."

"Will I be able to walk again?" Asked the girl with a dopey grin.

"You did not hurt any of your legs." The doctor sighed as if he was not paid enough for this. "You will be fully recovered after 12 hours of sleep."

Stella nodded her head as the regenerative glass dome took over. She struggled a little, the enclosed space was getting too claustrophobic for her liking.  

"Don't try to fight it, skeletal reconstruction hurts like a bitch."

"Thanks, doctor, that was oh... so...reassuring." Stella managed to sneak in a snarky remark before the anesthesia knocked her out.

-----------------------------

Stella didn't mean to resist the treatment, but her mind couldn't seem to rest. She wandered about in her memories of the last day on Earth. The planet had fallen closer and closer to the Sun, and as the ground melted and the ocean rose, the evacuation lines grew longer and longer. She saw her parents, frantically trying to pave the way for a little girl to escape. Stella ran along with them, she begged them to stay instead of parting ways like she once did so ingeniously. But the result had always been the same with these dreams. Once again she ended up helpless, trapped in an escape pod after losing both of her guardians, one to the scorching heat of Earth, the other to the piercing frost of space. 

Suddenly, a rush of energy penetrated all of her senses. Stella's left arm twitched violently as the pain from her rib and shoulder quickly bled to the other parts of her body. Her eyes were wide open but she could only see the tint of colors melting into one another, and amongst the muffled sounds traveling about her head, she could only make sense of one familiar voice.

-Sorry Stellaris, I have to do this- 

She looked down and saw a blue stream of liquid entering her veins, she could feel them reaching through every corner of her cells, infecting them in one way or another. Had she blown her cover? Or was this another specter coming back in time to rectify her mistake? The pain intensified as Stella gasped for air, but with it came back some of her vision. The sunken face in front of her was familiar, she frantically searched through her memories for a match but the anesthesia had no plan to give way. 

Realizing that Stella was fully awake, the shadow looming over her pulled away. 

[Lange?] Stella whispered, the figure looked oddly similar to that of her previous partner in the Survival exam. Our assassin could feel the veins in her eyes popping as she fixated on the backlit figure. But why? Did Saskia Lange resent being the bait in that forest? Was that a valid reason to kill a schoolmate? Stella wanted to ask, but the other girl had already sneaked out of left the room. 

Unable to crack open the regenerative glass dome, Stella rested her palm on the glass surface and counted down what seemed like her last few seconds on Earth. The enclosed chamber pulled her back and forth between sickbay and the cramped escape pod on that apocalyptic day, until the pain finally melted away. Flashes of blue and white lights then gave in to the darkness, and our girl once again fell deep in yet another dreamless slumber, not knowing when she would wake up next.