Critical Astral ：Academy Enrollment

Hoshino is fourteen years old, and the military academy has already given her a callsign: Frost.
At this school, children are trained like weapons, graded like spare parts, and discarded just as easily.
Hoshino’s plan is simple—survive long enough to keep her squad alive, keep her head down, and never become the kind of casualty the system forgets by dinner.

That plan fails almost immediately.

In the lower campus of the Federal military academy, Hoshino learns that survival has very little to do with talent and everything to do with endurance, hunger, politics, and knowing exactly when to bite back. Brutal field classes, corrupt power structures, and a school culture built to break people force her to do the one thing she never wanted to do: rely on others. Slowly, reluctantly, she builds Squad 144 out of the kind of cadets who are too difficult, too damaged, or too dangerous to fit anywhere else.

Then the academy sends them into a three-week survival assessment on a rainforest death-world scourged by firestorms and hunted by military trackers.

They survive.

Barely.

For the final exam, Hoshino and the seven other survivors are assigned to the Federal destroyer Yukikaze for what should be a routine escort operation to the Orion-Alpha system. Instead, they arrive in the middle of an Imperial offensive. The fleet collapses. The port becomes a slaughterhouse. Yukikaze is damaged, cut off, and hunted. When the captain goes down and the chain of command breaks, the students are forced to take over a warship in the middle of a retreat.

And after they escape, they realize the worst part isn’t the battle.

It’s what comes next.

Stranded in unknown space with a crippled destroyer, a fractured crew, and something aboard valuable enough for the Empire to keep chasing them, Hoshino must hold her people together, keep the ship alive, and find a way home before war finishes what the academy started.