Tanya glared at the red envelope Schugel waved in front of her face. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure? Second Lieutenant, it could be all that stands between you and failure."

"As if using the safeword wasn't an indication of failure."

Schugel's motivation to hand her the safeword in advance was suspect. Tanya considered the procedure a sham that met formal guidelines despite violating their spirit. She refused to take his advice at face value.

"An indication, yes, but not of failure. Even though I conduct equipment tests in controlled environments, there is the possibility of encountering an unknown variable absent from the test's specification. The procedure was set up to mitigate that risk in a timely fashion."

In theory, it was a sound justification and the people who approved of Schugel's idea were probably unaware of how terrible his execution would be. After giving it some thought, Tanya put the value of that probability between "low" and "very low" because one would have to be blind and stupid to overlook Schugel's propensity to turn good initiatives into disasters.

Tanya, on the other hand, was a practical person, and the question she prepared for him was a reflection of that: "Has the procedure ever been executed during a test?"

"No."

This was Tanya's "Gotcha!" moment. She couldn't get a word in edgewise, though, as Schugel made a quick follow up.

"The controlled testing environments I've designed have been faultless thus far. Statistically speaking, the longer this uninterrupted streak of successful tests continues, the higher is the risk of the anomaly's occurrence. It would be reckless to ignore this scientific fact."

If he wasn't her CO, she'd give him a piece of her mind and she'd give it to him right where it hurt. All of Tanya's predecessors who died during his so-called successful tests in supposedly controlled environments would disagree with his assessment. Schugel did not appear to fathom the practical issues that came with controlling the kind of power the Type 95 operation orb was capable of unleashing.

She grabbed the envelope to make him stop waggling it by her nose. Schugel was wrong–there could be no argument about that–but Tanya found no real downside to playing along. She opened the envelope and gaped at the safeword written inside.

"'Argh'? That's simple, considering…"

"No, Second Lieutenant. Not 'eugh'. Argh. Enunciate! This procedure is critical to your survival."

Tanya rolled her eyes. She wasn't prone to rolling her eyes; she just wanted Schugel to see that she was flipping him off. He had no choice except to go with it because reprimanding her now would cause a delay.

"I see. Argh," she droned.

Schugel pushed a big red button that opened the service entrance to one of the furnaces. The time for jokes was over.

"I hope to see you as humoured and motivated at the end of this test as you are now. These are your orders: enter the furnace and assume position beneath the molten iron crucible that will be delivered to you."

That made the heat component of the stress test clear. Tanya secretly practiced the safeword in anticipation of the second part. Cooling magic should have been included in basic training. It was insane to have to improvise a vital spell under a container of molten iron in the very furnace melting that iron. Conducting any sort of magic in those conditions was bound to yield unexpected results, save for full-body burns.

Schugel continued: "Once delivered, keep the crucible in a fixed vertical position above you until it leaves the furnace. Your performance will be assessed in respect to the amount of metal left in the crucible at the time of exit. This measurement will conclude the test. How are you?"

He didn't show it, but it had to be a form of proactive revenge for her sass. Proactive because she hadn't done anything purposefully sassy beforehand and the test had to be prepared in advance. That meant Schugel could predict that his terrible character would provoke a hostile response from Tanya or his character was more terrible than she had imagined. If a PoW was treated this way, it would have been a war crime.

"Alive, motivated and willing to defect," she said absent-mindedly, too preoccupied with figuring out a way to survive the test.

"Eh?"

Tanya prodded him with another question, intent on driving the point home at all costs because it couldn't possibly worsen her current predicament, "May I ask if I am the first Aerial Mage to conduct this test?"

"Aerial Mages drafted from the mountains excelled at fighting off the heat."

Schugel's flat reply caught Tanya off guard. She had been positive that no one else survived this far into the testing regimen. Repeated attempts suggested that the stress test's inhumane design had been approved by Schugel's enablers. No sane government official would sign off on a procedure that put precious military personnel at risk of burning alive in liquid metal.

Wait. This isn't a government facility…

As the Engineering Director, Schugel answered to the Facility Manager or some other administrator assigned by a representative of Gustave Krupps, not to the Inspector General of Logistics Office. Tanya hated the fact she considered filing a request for government oversight to limit the freedom of the private enterprise that was the Elinium Factory. It went against her free market beliefs, but so did suicide at Schugel's behest.

"And where are they now?" she asked to avoid being fooled with semantics. Schugel spoke of those other Mages in past tense, so they could have died because of him.

"Protecting the Elinium Factory from rogue elements for the duration of your field trip."

Tanya lowered her head in shame. She made a scene about a test she believed impossible only to find out that she was bested by other Mages. Had she not asked, she would have continued assuming that she was the best testing personnel to date and acted like it. The embarrassment weighed heavily on her self-esteem.

"This by no means implies you are not special, Second Lieutenant. This combined variant of the heat and pressure test has been developed specifically for you. Your comrades at the Tactical Training Department are ready to be impressed. Are you?"

The Tactical Training Department. Tanya was assigned to them in the first place, yet her secondary role as testing personnel appeared to have taken precedence. Schugel manipulated statutes to receive formal approval for this torture. There was government oversight, after all, only the overseers were blind to Schugel's deviltry.

She gazed into the furnace's fiery innards. The sight made an impression, but Tanya wouldn't let that impression last long.

"No, but you better be. I'm going in!"

Just as she started marching towards the flames, Schugel grabbed her hand and said, "One more thing, Second Lieutenant: be careful."

"Professor Schugel, sir…" Tanya was speechless. Nothing about his person told her that he cared about her well-being, or any human's well-being for that matter. If it weren't for the hot air coming out of the furnace, she would have smiled at her unlikely error in judgement. Did Schugel have a heart despite everything?

"The furnace is not insured from magic damage. Take good care of it while you're inside."

He didn't. Schugel's heartlessness was absolute and Tanya was a fool to doubt her own in-depth assessment. Even though he called her special, he put a higher value on equipment than on her life. The insult went beyond objectification.

Human resources were to be valued, not squandered. As difficult as it was to fight Schugel's drive to extinction, Tanya vowed that she would not allow him to waste her potential.

The knowledge about the ins and outs of a byzantine bureaucracy that she carried over from her previous life was her secret weapon. If all else failed, she would fight Schugel through the due process that placed him above her. For now, she had to settle for venting her frustrations to her outlandish CO. The doors his approval could open discouraged her from passing the point of no return this early. It was a high risk, high reward line of work.

As she entered the furnace and saw the service entrance seal behind her, she felt her remaining optimism vanish. There was no fair market price that Schugel could afford to pay for her services.

The moisture she had on her face after the wash evaporated in a puff of steam, indicating that she would need to rely on her operation orb for thereon in.

Tanya cast a few basic spells to check how magic performed in this environment before picking a suitable method of life support. She realised that she couldn't conjure a cooling spell; her style of casting involved a natural affinity for heat, which would have required serious alterations to agitated mana. The last time she tried that, she suffered from internal bleeding and nearly caused an explosion that would have blown the testing facility into smithereens. The temperature was rising too quickly to bank on this strategy.

A Mage's personal shield offered protection from small arms fire, but it was useless against an environmental foe. Erecting an impregnable magic barrier sounded like a better pick and Tanya would have immediately gone for it if it weren't for the massive amount of mana the spell required. She didn't need a bubble intended to stop an artillery shell to stay cool.

What she needed was a way to diffuse the heat or at least prevent it from transferring to her body. Tanya's first decision was to rise above the floor and avoid any contact with solid surfaces. This allowed her to insulate herself from the worst offenders among heat conductors. A sweat-inducing spell came second. It required little mana and offered protection in case a more powerful safeguard expired.

The tests Tanya had endured taught her that brute force alone was a no-go. She had to be clever with how she used her mana. Like a mountain river, she would find the path of least resistance to reach her destination.

The heat was starting to get to her as she approached the main chamber of the furnace, so she used a material variant of the spell that saved her from residual mana during the first test. This time, she used her mana to manipulate the air around her, forcing it to spin in a tight vortex.

She couldn't see anything outside the vortex due to the visual distortions it caused. It also became apparent that the growing amount of heat swirling around her would eventually knock her out. Restricting her magic to gentle spells to avoid damaging the equipment added another layer of difficulty to the test.

Tanya closed her eyes since they were useless and focused on the environmental data gathered by her operation orb. The chamber Tanya entered housed a set of multi-directional rails used to haul crucibles. The molten metal containers rose from a central point in the floor, where the most intense heat was coming from.

Schugel could have churned out an even harder test if he wanted to. The heat inside the chamber Tanya was in could undo a hapless intruder in a matter of minutes, but it paled in comparison to what was happening at the lower level, where the actual melting of the metal took place.

Movement below interrupted her concentration, nearly collapsing the vortex of scorching air onto her. Tanya's operation orb was beginning to show signs of overheating, prompting her to pull it out of her uniform to improve airflow.

Levitation, air vortex, support and now directing hot air away from the glowing red orb–Tanya has exhausted the quad core's multi-tasking capability. Any additional commands would interfere with her current spells, all of which were critical just to carry on. To make matters worse, the vortex required an increasing amount of mana to dissipate the non-stop onslaught of heat. The orb's computations pointed to an explosive finish if she didn't find a solution.

The testing object arrived in the meantime. A crucible half-filled with molten metal rose from the flames in the centre of the chamber. A pair of hooks suspended from the rails pulled the container up and directed it towards Tanya. The main event was about to begin.

As the crucible arrived directly above Tanya, the chains keeping the hooks in a fixed position were released: the giant container of molten metal was going to crush Tanya.

"Gack!"

She cried out and scrambled to produce enough lift to slow it down. Never mind keeping it afloat, Tanya was too preoccupied with her environment to prepare the appropriate spell.

"Was that you mispronouncing the safeword again?" she heard Schugel's distant voice.

Was she? Tanya still had the safeword between her and the container of metal about to squash her. There was no point in bravery if it were to kill her.