The training has to continue.

The days following the spa excursion were a strange, stagnant calm. Adrián showed no signs of life. There were no messages, no calls. The silence of the burner phone was as deafening as Costa's orders had been before. Magi checked the device with a mix of anxiety and relief, both hoping for and fearing the next buzz.

Costa, for her part, seemed more irritated than worried.

"Mr. Soler must be busy with his emergency," she commented with sarcasm during a brief report. "Stay ready. Patience is a virtue, cadet. And in the meantime, your training cannot be neglected. You have lost much focus."

And so, Magi was thrown back into the academy's brutal routine. But it was a different routine. The experience with Adrián, the **** exposure, and the constant humiliation had left a deep mark, redefining the limits of her modesty. Magi's body, already accustomed to nudity as a state of the mission, now responded with the clumsiness of one who has spent too much time acting and has forgotten how to simply be.

In a small act of rebellion, or perhaps due to simple habit acquired in the missions, sometimes Magi dared not to wear underwear under the rough uniform, a practice that before would have been unthinkable. The standard training uniform, loose and rough, became a battlefield where her mental carelessness manifested physically, but also a surprisingly fragile barrier against exposure.

In a climbing exercise on the practice wall, she grabbed a fake rock hold with too much ****, and the fabric of her t-shirt sleeve snagged on a metal protrusion, tearing with a loud rrrip from shoulder to elbow. It wasn't a discreet tear, but an open wound in the fabric that left her arm exposed.

"Cadet Rojas!" roared Sub-officer Costa, who seemed to have a radar for her failures. "Can you not go a day without destroying the equipment? That uniform comes out of your pay!"

Magi didn't blush. Her reaction was a heavy sigh of professional annoyance, not personal shame. The exposure of the arm seemed almost irrelevant to her; it was the economic cost and Costa's reprimand that really irritated her. Her classmates' laughter was less mocking this time and more tired. She had become a sort of recurring natural disaster.

The next day, during an obstacle course, while crawling under low wire, the training pants, already weakened by use and perhaps a poorly made seam, gave way at the crotch. This time, the opening was large enough to be embarrassing, but shame didn't paralyze her.

The cold air immediately seeped onto her skin, an obvious reminder that, as she had done several times since her return, she was wearing nothing underneath. The tear felt damp and uncomfortable, and the exposure was palpable.

"For the love of God, Rojas!" shouted the assigned instructor. "It looks like you dress in tissue paper! Fix that!"

Magi stood up, her face remaining impassive. Her biggest worry wasn't her classmates' gaze, nor the exposure of her body, but the interruption of the exercise and the certainty of another fine. With her hand pressed to her thigh, she finished the exercise. It was no longer a humiliation that destroyed her; the sensation of being exposed had been trivialized, reduced to a simple logistical annoyance.

Costa watched these incidents with an expression of pure contempt.

"Not only is she clumsy with men, it seems," she told her in a low voice, walking past her after she was handed a spare pair of pants, mended and faded. "She is clumsy with herself. A perfect candidate for failure."

At night, in her apartment, she sewed the tears with thick thread and clumsy stitches, as she had done with the pink uniform. But these seams weren't an act of resistance, but of resignation. She was mending her own decayed façade, knowing that the next day something new would give way.

Adrián's absence created a void that was filled by the academy's relentless pressure. Magi felt like a beaten boxer, staggering, waiting for the next blow, but the blow didn't come from the expected place. It came from the tearing fabric, from Costa's gaze, from her own inability to maintain composure. It was a **** of attrition, slow and methodical, and Adrián's shadow, somewhere managing his "emergency," loomed over everything—a promise that the main hell was only on pause.