Fixture in Fate (Superhero/Worm-like)

[Sarius]

Chapter 63: Line

Watching the man move had been terrifying.

Aaliyah was someone hardened to grand displays of power, with having dealt with particularly unstable Linked while she'd acted as the Monarch. Her own Linked, those aligned to her father's little empire, had once tried to intimidate their way into holding power over her. What it had granted them was a fear for their family's safety, especially after she'd sent physical mail to their children and partners.

A low blow to be sure, but she wasn't ever intending on actually doing anything to them. Well, except for getting those Linked themselves killed, but that was within scope for her.

Ajax had always been a man of indeterminant power. The displays of strength he'd managed were few and far between, and the feats of his consistent strength, while surely impressive, weren't overly so. He could lift large weights, but not truly large weights. He could take a solid hit, but not something that was engineered to kill.

Aaliyah was tougher, and slowly becoming competitive in raw strength, especially after she'd learned to counterbalance her rage with the trust that she held within herself. Now that the trust she possessed slowly grew, with those around her and even herself, the rage and anger that fuelled her strength could increase to match.

But she hadn't expected to watch Ajax rise to new heights so suddenly.

To her knowledge he'd done no training of particular note or had any real impressive breakthrough in training with Willem, or in combat with Ren. But everyone had been watching that first bout between Ajax and Ren, the two men always being the quickest into training, and their fights always being an enjoyable spectacle.

It was different right from the start. Aaliyah wasn't sure how she knew, but she did. She could almost feel that power on the man's bronzed skin while Ren's hair wrapped his right arm in tight restraint. It was in how Ajax reacted to the events, almost as if he wasn't at all concerned as he had been before. He was no longer trying to swipe at the hair with his axe, cleaving them from the other man's use.

Instead, he simply pulled himself free.

The next few moments had been truly astounding. The way Ajax moved, the simple movements being so unavoidable and unswerving. He was a titan, a goliath, a statue of the densest stone come to life. In the heat of the interaction, Aaliyah had let her eyes glance over to the collection of their three overseers. All of them stood as they always did; neutral observers to the fight before them—yet she was perceptive enough to see the collective glint in their eyes.

They had expected something like this. Aaliyah wasn't sure how they had known, but the look on the former Osmium's face was impressive, even showing through the thick layer of stoicism that the man was famous for. Osmium's eyes were burning with a very particular type of excitement, something that Aaliyah hadn't ever seen in someone before, and certainly not experienced herself.

When she turned her eyes back to Ajax, she saw the final movement he took, grabbing the significantly morphed hair of his opponent and easily lifting him up to where his eyes could meet with the defeated opponent's.

Aaliyah heard the words that Ajax said but they didn't quite compute till his head shifted to look right at her.

"Aaliyah," Ajax's voice boomed like the beating of a drum, "it's your turn now."

Her eyes locked with his, she found herself in the presence of a totally different type of being, one that she had only seen sparing moments of in others. She'd dealt with the chaotic her whole life, and even learned to take ultimate advantage of it. A chaotic person could be manipulated easily, a chaotic world always had something that people were forgetting, but Ajax wasn't filled with chaos.

No, he was orderly. All straight lines and clear eyes. The man's link, for as nebulous as it was, lacked the real complexity that the other's in the group had to grapple with. And now that he'd come to understand, he had come one step closer to order, protection, and defence itself. In a horrifying moment of realisation, as Ajax stood with his opponent held in possibly the most overbearing positions, Aaliyah realised what was so interesting about Ajax to Willem and Osmium.

He was like them.

The rapture came with a wide eyed glance, snapping towards the trainers that were now looking towards her under Ajax's sudden proclamation. Osmium, his eyes slowly leeching their fiery excitement, pushed his glasses up his nose gently and stared at her while Willem stood beside him with an amused look on his face. As if he knew that Aaliyah was coming to the conclusion now.

It was why she could never have properly controlled the team, like she had the other groups she'd inserted herself into. She was adept at chaos, and she'd thought, 'What was more chaotic than a group of untrained Linked?'

But they weren't chaotic. Walter was idealistic, yes, but he had a clear vision. Mirah, while the biggest candidate for pure chaos, was more than a little definite in the way she thought, even black and white in some instances. And Ajax?

Ajax was almost the worst of them all. He was the protector, and now that she looked into his coal black eyes, his every movement and glance filled with surety and power, she knew that he was right.

She let her eyes drop from the powerful man's gaze, taking a deep breath and preparing herself for what would come. The world around her disappearing as she let her mind meld with the darkness that lurked within, letting it feed her mind in a way that she hadn't allowed since she'd been the Monarch.

She couldn't be like the rest of her team, that was a fool's errand. She was too imbued with that chaos to possibly achieve that. Really, Aaliyah believed herself to just be a single part order within a whirling storm of chaos surrounding it, interjecting just enough to keep it from tearing itself apart.

Until now, she'd been focusing on control, on technique, on power. But that was never her immediate strength. Her strength wasn't in any of those things; it was in versatility, adaptability, unpredictability. Ajax had found his own spot, shaping himself in a way that granted him a great deal of power. Walter seemed to only be scratching the surface in just how far he could go. Mirah's link simply surpassed Aaliyah's immediate understanding at all.

So where was she supposed to fit in that? With her power, and her disposition?

She looked up from the spot on the floor she'd zoned out while staring at, finding the eyes of her partner, the physically adept morph Linked. They shared a muted look, her partner trying to make sense of the current situation and Aaliyah mustering her resolve in a final, quiet moment.

"Looks like it's time, Jamie." Aaliyah's said, smiling ruefully. But even Jamie saw that the smile came to Aaliyah's face a little too easily, quickly moving to hide something else below it. "Prepare yourself." Aaliyah intoned deeply, jarring against the usually neutral or light tones of her voice, betraying the easy smile on her face.

Jamie got into her starting position, something more akin to a running pose than a fighter's stance. Aaliyah, however, did much the same as her teammate had done only a minute ago. She stood completely open, discarding the use of the fighting stances that she'd been using against the other woman.

Aaliyah widened her arms, showing off the proportional length of them and the pale skin that was only partially covered by a training shirt. With a single step forward, the fight had begun. Jamie almost hesitated, wondering if the step forward that the woman had taken meant that it had begun. However, Jamie was unwilling to give in to the other girl's mind games, hesitation only having been punished severely in past bouts with Aaliyah.

Jamie rushed forwards, using both legs and arms to propel herself with a shocking speed that only actual movement links could rival. On the self-repairing arena floor, four gouges were left where Jamie's claws had raked through the material, their sharpness trumping the linktech material.

However, Aaliyah stood before the girl's path, a sudden shock of red splattering across her skin with the powerful blue that usually accompanied it. Jamie thought that she would make it before the tall blonde would be able to react, but there was a moment of stunning confusion when Jamie blinked…

And Aaliyah was no longer there.

Jamie's senses lit on fire as she tried to understand what'd just happened, her brain using that fraction of a second to compute as much useless information as it could, before she felt a distinct pull against the high collar of her jumper. Jamie's wide eyes snapped down to see Aaliyah's face, body in limbo position as Jamie moved over her in slow motion.

Aaliyah grinned, grabbing the other girl by her collar and, with a horrible impact, Jamie could feel the linktech concrete meet against the scale that covered her body almost completely. All the force of her jump was redirected into the ground, having her skid across the surface on her belly. The sound of her keratin-like scales on the rough stone made Jamie immediately panic.

Ignoring the pain, Jamie clambered to her feet, looking down at the thoroughly ripped jumper. It was falling apart from the massive section that'd been destroyed from Aaliyah's throw. Beneath, Jamie wore a t-shirt that didn't do a good job of hiding the graduating brown scales that totally covered the vast majority of her body underneath her baggy clothing.

Jamie's first instinct was to return to the fight and think about her quickly mounting anxiety later. But as she looked up, converting her anxiety into rage toward the other woman, she found Aaliyah covered in large swathes of colour; red and blue mainly, but there was another colour present.

It was blue as well, but a different kind from the larger potions. This blue was light, but not a pleasant baby blue. Somehow this colour almost seemed… shaky and destabilising. Aaliyah moved a few steps forward and, with a sudden intensity, Jamie's anxiety went from manageable to borderline manic.

The world around her sucked in, as if she'd suddenly been put on a stage, a massive, hot light blaring into her face and highlighting her every minute detail. Jamie could feel her breathing speed up, only trapping her more and more in the cycle of thought as her mind latched onto the eyes that she was sure was watching her.

Then the actual punch in the gut came. The one that was not at all created by the vision of a dark audience to her disfigured body, but a genuine fist that placed itself solidly in her gut at full force. With a whirling sense of inertia, she was ripped from the vision, Jamie suddenly realised that she was flying through the air. Breaking the moment of illusion and forcing her to shift desperately in mid-air, the force of the blow continued to last as she scratched into the floor with her sharp claws.

It took a moment for her to stabilise against the push, then feel the horrible reactionary clench in her gut as she realised that her jumper had managed to fall off of her scaled form completely. Now her extended arms were exposed in their entire length, including the long claws that were embedded a few centimetres into the floor.

She looked up, desperately trying to get a hold of where Aaliyah was once again, but all she could see was a knee, covered in that angry, burning red. Just above where the collar had once covered the bottom of Jamie's scaled face, Aaliyah's knee contacted with a crack of explosive force, sending Jamie's head back so fast that it made her vision go totally white.

With another flurry of disorienting movement, Aaliyah's legs wrapped around the other girl's scaled neck and used the rest of the force to throw her to the ground.

Aaliyah held her legs in that hasty takedown, wrapped around Jamie's neck for a few more moments, then quickly pulling away and taking a few steps back. Breathing heavily and trying to compose herself, she pulled herself from the whirl of ideas that she'd delved into to defeat the other girl so completely.

She looked down at Jamie, who seemed to have passed out; if not when the knee had interacted with her face, then definitely when she'd been thrown to the ground. Aaliyah forced down the emotions that shifted across her skin, the ones that she'd released to power her during her fight.

The hardest to push down was the one she was most unfamiliar with handling, anxiousness. The light blue wanted desperately to take over the rest of her skin, pushing away the trust and enflaming the already engorged rage. Ripping herself from the emotions that were necessary for her to fight was an astoundingly difficult task, requiring a moment of almost meditative silence.

The emotions leaked from her skin like molten metal, dripping deep into the depths of her, far from the showcase of colours they had been moments before. She found herself sweating profusely, realising how close she'd let herself become to the line, one that threatened to allow those emotions to run rampant.

Aaliyah realised that she'd always struggle against that line, power versus control.

She'd just have to get really, really good at walking it.


A/N: So, something pretty cool, I actually ran a TTRPG session using Fixture in Fate as a setting. Custom links and all. Surprisingly it went really well, and was a whole lot of fun to explore the setting from that different angle! If you wanna know, I used a modified version of Weaverdice, Worm's own TTRPG system.

Thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., and TheBreaker. Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun. Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 64: Humbling

Julia had been picked to bring Jamie to the infirmary, leaving behind her own partner to take care of her teammate. And, after dressing her as well as she could with a blanket that the suited Indian woman named Tracker seemed to produce from nowhere, Julia set off with the other girl on the top of her amorphous form.

Carrying someone was actually remarkably easy for Julia, especially since she could just reform her body into a sizable and vaguely rectangular shape. That way, she could effectively keep the person that laid atop her extraordinarily stable as she used little feet to propel her forwards smoothly.

Of course, Julia herself didn't think much of it, especially not now as she still had the two massive fights in a row to chew on. Julia had taken her teammates to the infirmary enough times to know the gist by now, and it all really just worked off muscle memory at this point. The person with a heal link on duty just gave her teammate a once over and pointed them towards a bed that she was to be placed onto until further notice.

Heal links were rare, exceedingly so. The ability to heal yourself, either through natural regeneration, or some other method was common enough. Julia and Jamie already had some form of it, though Julia's was far more impressive than Jamie's. Julia was capable of effectively being over eighty percent destroyed, then eating ravenously for a few weeks and being totally fine.

But healing of others was a rarity, and most times out of ten it was almost a side effect of the link's capabilities. Ability to turn back time in a specific area? You can use it to heal major wounds or even bring the dead back to life.

But actual healing? Almost no one had access to healers like that. There was one who lived in Canada, as far as anyone could tell. Apparently, they were a hypercognitive of sorts, could basically diagnose anything and treat it with a sort of biological control. They didn't do anything with their link, and they didn't have to, as Canada has extremely strict Linked privacy laws and also have government support when identities have been discovered.

Despite being so close to America, apparently Canada was doing a fabulous job at holding their own against Centerpiece and his legion of brainwashed, patriotic Linked. Or, well, not quite brainwashed, not when real brainwashing was a thing that could be done.

As Julia mused on topic after topic that fluttered into her mind, Jamie began to rouse from her unconsciousness, shifting in her bed and making the disposable pillows and bedsheets crinkle. Julia almost sighed and would of if she still had the biological function behind doing so, but she managed to brush her mind of the scattered topics and return to the one that loomed over all others in her mind.

"Hey," Julia said softly, the crystalline nature of her voice somehow making it even more soothing, "are you feeling okay? Do you want me to grab the doc?" Her words travelled into the ears of the slowly waking Jamie, who groaned senselessly for a moment before squinting severely against the dulled lights of the quiet infirmary.

"Did I get…" Jamie began, her voice bubbly and hoarse, forcing her to swallow against the gunky dryness in her throat and mouth, "Did I get knocked out?"

"Kneed to the face." Julia said softly, making the other girl wince with a flash of memory of the event, "I'm surprised your nose isn't broken." The other girl reached up and gently felt at her nose, wincing yet again as she felt where the knee had impacted, or at least some part of the leg.

"I must've, it's too sore. It would've healed by now otherwise." Jamie let her arm flop down to her side, sighing heavily before groaning and pushing herself up into a sitting position, something that Julia let her do by herself like she'd requested so many times before.

"So, Aaliyah took me out, as easy as that?" She said finally, her eyes downcast even with the heavy squinting that was slowly relieving as she accustomed to the light. Julia wiggled her gelatinous body in an approximation of a shrug.

"I don't know about easily…" she said softly, regarding the slowly recovering girl in front of her, "It looks like she can lose control and needed some time to cool down after that. If it were a real fight, Ren probably could have taken her out while she tried to recalibrate."

Jamie scowled for a moment, mostly at herself, then sighed with a drop in her shoulders, "Unless, you know, she could just keep scaling upwards. Then we're all fucked." Her doom and gloom tone was one that Julia had gotten used to over the months spent with her teammate. She tended to fall into that pit and need to spend some time in it to really pull herself back out.

"We can't know that, Jamie." Julia said, letting a little frustration with the girl's immediate downer response, "She could explode like a firework instead for all we know. Getting yourself down over losing once really isn't worth the effort."

"Once? Julia, she wiped the floor with me, just like Ajax did to Ren." Jamie growled, amplifying off of the minor frustration in her friend's voice, "Ajax was already beating Ren a fair amount of the time, but now it's clear that it'll only continue to get worse…"

Julia watched her friends face, having been uncovered slightly by the blanket that she'd been wrapped in, as it contorted in a restrained rage that made a small fire light in what would be Julia's chest.

"Are you kidding me?" Julia said hotly, though the volume of her voice didn't rise significantly, "You're already rolling over and giving up after being beaten once."

Jamie's face screwed up at the girl who'd quickly become her closest friend since arriving at the AASAU training centre. It wasn't because of her grating tone, or the emotional response, but instead that it was said as a statement. It was not a question, it was a statement of what Julia could see happening right in front of her, and Jamie quickly realised that she didn't know how to respond to the other girl's surety.

"Jamie, you do this every time things get hard! You use every trick you can to squirm out of something or do the least amount of work and face as little challenge as you can." Julia spoke in that same heated voice, and for Jamie it was like sitting a little too close to a radiator and feeling your eyes and skin dry out, "Haven't you realised in training that you are the one who has made the least amount of progress?"

Jamie stared into her purple formed friend, a weak scowl on her face, left over from when she felt as if she'd had any ground to stand on. Now, though, she realised that her argument it was being eaten from right underneath her by the gentle tide of entropy. No, she wasn't so blind that she hadn't noticed the other three in the team going from almost physically disabled by their newfound links, to being relatively exceptional in Ren's case, to high picks for genuine powerhouses in June and Julia.

She had been watching it all happen, right in front of her eyes. But she was content with that, that they would inevitably grow stronger than her, and that they would surpass her and fly off into the distance. In fact, she was content in never, ever being trained to her full potential and being left unaware of the heights that she could theoretically reach, despite the AASAU offering their link analysts to the entire team.

No, Jamie wanted to go and work as a test subject in a nice country and live out her life in maximum comfort without the pressures of training or performing on any level. Even training at the AASAU was pushing it for her, but she didn't have dual citizenship like Ren and June had, so she had no other options for training. Not that Zimbabwean training program was better in any way than the AASAU.

She hated that she could almost see Julia's disappointed face in the shapeless blob of her form, an effect of the girl confiding in her about how she'd looked pre-goopification. After she'd seen the photo of the bookish, but quietly gorgeous woman, she'd looked back and never been able to unsee a bizarre resemblance between the purple blob and her prior form.

"Your motives are changing." Jamie said quietly, idly becoming conscious about the fact that her scaled chin was uncovered and pulled the blanket up to cover it. "You used to be the same as me, Julia, even if you did the training. Now you're going against me all of a sudden. Why?"

She had stumped the girl; Jamie knew that much. They'd never spoken so candidly about their shared apathy for the world at large, or even the city of Melbourne itself, and their uncaring want to just be left alone to live their life. But this sure blew that can of worms wide open. Jamie's first reaction was to jump to the other girl's crush on the Greek man in their opposing team, who somehow stood out in her mind as tall despite their own team having someone half a foot taller.

However, if she did that, she'd just be lying to herself that it was so black and white. From what Jamie had surmised, Julia had been hesitant about even directly talking to the man for a while, for no other reason than she was a nervous wreck and she liked him. It was almost a highschool-type crush, and with Julia's self-confidence being even worse than Jamie's, it wasn't as if she was going to summon that courage out of nowhere. Point being, the man couldn't have talked the idea into her head.

"You know…" The crystalline voice broke the silence that had built, though lacking any heat it'd possessed before, "I started to feel inadequate, in comparison to Walter. We didn't talk much, only between spars, and we aren't really friends. But when we did, I always felt like his words were just a bit… surer than mine."

Julia paused, letting Jamie soak in the words, or maybe even looking for a small sign of confirmation from her friend. And, despite Jamie's best effort, that was exactly what she got. With a grimace, Jamie recalled the little quips that Aaliyah and she had shared, and the moments of conversation. All of which had made her feel just as Julia had described. Inadequate.

"I–" Julia stammered over her own words, but recuperated and powered on, "I don't think that they are anything more than us. Maybe in some ways—Walter's link most of all—but not that much more than us. It was just how they commented on things, like each sentence had a full stop at the end, rather than trailing off with unsurety…"

Jamie had picked up on the unsure ending immediately, finding it to be a perfect consolidation of the other woman's point. Jamie's own stance was coming crumbling down already, and it was almost painful to understand that it might just be her that was going against the flow instead of following it's current.

"The matches." Jamie said solemnly after a few minutes of contemplative silence between the two friends, "When I had to tell her about the matches they needed to fight on weekends… that's when I realised that there was something weird about them. She knew nothing–" Jamie paused with a grimace, then continued, "no, she knew a lot, and I was just filling in the jigsaw puzzle for her. But even still, when I talked about it, trying to tell her how utterly fucked their team was, I just couldn't get through to her."

Julia didn't say anything, sitting atop the surface of a guest chair aside Jamie's bed. She let the other woman slowly come to an understanding as she spewed forth the jumbled contents of her mind, forcing herself to order it so she could even put it into words at all. Julia understood Jamie's frustration, especially as her face contorted minutely as she thought through her next words.

"I'm starting to get the feeling that it wasn't just misplaced pride and wilful ignorance now. Did you seriously think that they'd start to catch up and beat any of us in literally less than a week?" Jamie questioned to her friend, though they both knew it was rhetorical, "I thought I would just watch them be crushed come Sunday, or at least struggle, but the way this is going, we're going to watch some team get slaughtered in seconds 'cause they thought they'd have easy pickings with the newbies."

And with that, Jamie had skilfully danced around the point. The real point, anyways. They weren't just impressive; they had trumped them so thoroughly that they'd distilled months of training into less than a week of combat training and were already moving to swiftly surpass them. All four of them had something about them that was just different, in that same, intangible way that you could just tell when someone you knew in primary school was going to end up doing something cool. Then, next minute, you hear through a friend of a friend that they ended up showcasing their art in a full-on museum display of just their work.

"Do you think…" Julia dragged out the word, trying to determine if her next words would make her seem silly or not, but then committing anyway, "Do you think they might be sponsored by a world-wide corp? Th.inc, Techtron, VantaBlac?"

Jamie chewed on the thought for a moment, trying to tease any of the limited understanding she had out of her mind. But, in the end, she'd come up with nothing. With a sigh, Jamie pushed herself out of bed, determining herself sufficiently recovered, and wrapping the blanket around her as best as she could before giving her friend a parting sentence.

"I have no idea, but there is only one place that we're going to be able to find out."

And with that, she started to walk out of the room, leaving Julia to catch up to her suddenly highly active friend, giving the on-duty nurse a thankful wave, before bounding out of the door to chase the woman that was likely going to try and get herself into some trouble.


A/N: A full stack of chapters. As good as diamonds, I'd say!

Thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., and TheBreaker. Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun. Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 65: Unlikely

The two girls stood opposite each other, both of them sweating profusely in their spots within the sectioned off area they'd been given to compete. They had been at it for hours, unrelenting in their fierce and quiet competition. Those that had remained after Aaliyah and Jamie's fight, Walter, Ren, and Ajax had all stopped training hours ago, instead turning to watch the two women fight.

Their bouts lasted only a few seconds each time, always starting with June rushing towards Mirah at a speed Mirah couldn't possibly react to by sheer biological limitations. By the time June had started moving, Mirah had already begun her own preparations for what was to come. The onlookers to the battles were continually baffled by what was going on, the movements almost incomprehensible in the moment.

Walter, probably the most tactically minded of the group in battle, always spent the moments after the conclusion of the fight to outline what had just happened to the rest of the onlookers. It took hours for the first of them to leave, and since the arenas were technically closing for the night, Willem tactfully left the lights on and the door open for them to continue with their fights unimpeded.

The two girls were focused, and while they had realised that they'd been left behind for the night, they had paid little attention to it. They were focused solely on their fighting and waging a war between minor successes and failures. It always came down to the wire, between three, four, and five evasions of June's attacks. Only once had Mirah managed a sixth, an event that had gone wholly unnoticed by any other than the combatants themselves and the trainers that constantly oversaw their training.

It was all a game of pure skill, on both of the girl's parts. And with that had come the quiet rise of June's capabilities since they had begun training. She had originally thought that there would be no challenge in the fights, like many of her fights beforehand had been. They were useless for her progression, and her only competition were machines and numbers that quantified her.

But now, in the oddest of places and in the oddest of ways, she'd found herself a true rival.

June flashed forwards with a speed she couldn't have achieved only a week before, but now her every start was faster and smoother than the last, though that had never worked against the other girl. The first movement was always a write off for June, where Mirah had the advantage of knowing it far in advance of even June herself.

The next few blows were always a balancing act between doing enough to where Mirah was suitably thrown around and maintaining speed and momentum to continue the frenzied assault on the woman. This was where June had gained the most benefit, in the fine control of that tightrope walk.

June had quietly become the most powerful in her group, which had been a contest between herself and Ren mostly. Ren, while becoming stronger to a degree, hadn't evolved in such a drastic way as June had. The really astounding part for June, however, was not her own progression. It was Mirah's progression that had stunned her most.

Mirah wasn't physically strong, nor was she even particularly athletic aside from the basis that came with being a Linked in the first place. The reality is that she wasn't likely to ever be much more than a very fit human, maybe reaching further beyond that with inordinate amounts of training. So, it only really served to make it more impressive when she was capable of keeping up with June's movements to such a degree.

As June had gotten better, so had Mirah, even managing to outstrip her in this particular contest of skill. Mirah clear precognitive abilities were comprehensive and weren't thrown off even when June intentionally changed her methods in the middle of a bout to add to the erratic mess that would usually knock a precognitive flat.

Precognitive were a weird subset of link expression. Both extremely rare and widely misunderstood. The definition for precognition had changed substantially over the years, especially when much of that small population was made up of people who were effectively hypercognitives that were capable of merely doing massive calculations in their head.

True precognitive links were just strange, and rarely of any use. Some only allowed for a split second to be seen in advance, some allowed for strange and eclectic paintings of the far future that made little to no sense. Even the most powerful precogs came with some strangeness to them, either restricted in what they can say because oof the impact it might have, or so powerful that it dominates their being entirely.

Mirah, however, was different. June had known another precognitive, just by pure chance, when she still lived in Zimbabwe. They had been limited by the effort it took them to prepare for 'seeing', and then even after that their divination had been filled with unspecific vagaries. Mirah wasn't like that. Mirah's link was sharp and precise, clearly.

They hadn't really spoken on what made their respective links tick, and June's was pretty boring unless you were to look into the science of it. Mirah's link, however, was filled with the interest that you expected from the nebulous links the AASAU loved to label as Undefined. It was baffling to June, as far she was concerned, any link is a link that can be utilised with practice. That the AASAU were so willing to give up on the potential that Undefined Linked represented was almost criminal, but she didn't make the rules.

Despite performing bout after bout, the two girls never seemed to truly waver with exhaustion, a benefit of being Linked. The ability to simply continue to push against the boundaries of their physical and mental capability with almost no consequences, so they delved deeper and deeper into the night with a stable fervour.

They had reached a point of absolute flow hours ago, a state where they simply sat and floated within practice against each other, enjoying the mix of comfort and strain on their minds and bodies as the challenged themselves relentlessly. They were both subsumed by the flow of it, taken with the glorious feeling of constant improvement beyond anything they were capable of alone.

Even Mirah, who was a hard woman to sway with immediate gratification, was finding herself enamoured with the training. It was as if she were drinking from an overflowing font of creativity and ingenuity, fuelling her mind to approach and understand the web of golden lines that made up the immediate futures.

She'd become good at understanding the likelihood of any given future happening, but she was still bound by the limitation that she'd only truly know the outcome as it happened. However, that wasn't necessarily the entire story, and Mirah had begun to see a great success within her ability to more accurately delineate between possible forks in the webbed future.

It wasn't so much an actual calculation, or really a clear signal either, but was all based in comprehension instead. When she looked at a web of events now, her eyes simply followed the most likely path, and the rest of those paths were immediately whittled down to those that were capable of realistically happening, instead of showing literally every option.

As Mirah's mind had progressed further, she'd become capable of condensation of events. There were so many events that were all but guaranteed to happen sequentially, and when Mirah started to relate those actions strongly enough for them to almost combine on the web, she realised why she'd had so much difficulty early on.

The voices were confusing, not only because of their cacophony of voices, all rallying for different things, but because each voice was a slight variation on another. Actually having each variation of how a person could walk in the next few seconds really wasn't useful information, and when she had found her new aspect of her link, Mirah had become capable of condensing it into a visual 'map'.

The webbed map of lines that had once been a sprawling disk of infinite actions, which had also once been an overwhelming cacophony of voices, was now a collection of lines branching from a main tree. Each branch represented a diversion from what was 'most likely' and if such a branch were to be followed, then that branch would then become the beginning of a new tree of possibility.

Once she'd realised that the scenery of the web, while technically infinitely complex, was simply a tiny difference between ten other actions that already existed, the homogenisation of that scenery actualised Mirah's ability to accurately understand the future on a macro scale. But, even still, there was one problem.

Mirah wasn't capable of winning. It wasn't physically possible. The theoretical limit, barring non-physical means, was seven evasions. The only reason that Mirah knew that was because of the one time that she'd managed a sixth evasion. June hadn't quite caught on to that fact just yet, mostly because Mirah knew she was capable of staying at the same level due to June's inherent limitations.

You can only move so fast, and accelerate so fast, so in the specific situation of these bouts, June was capped at a certain level of effectiveness. But Mirah would always lose at the fifth evasion, unless an extraordinarily unlikely set of events coincided with one another. It would take June hesitating for just a moment on the fourth evasion, unlikely for someone so relentless as June, then choosing to go for a low sweep on the sixth…

Then the only option that Mirah would have is a tackle. It would have to be right as the other woman retreated with a gymnast's back handspring, but if Mirah could pull that off, then she'd almost surely be sent behind June. June would then try to attack her while off kilter from the first true contact she'd received from Mirah, which Mirah would be able to easily evade.

That would be what the seventh evasion would look like. The only problem being that its probability laid somewhere in the thousands to tens of thousands of attempts to get this extraordinarily specific set of circumstances to line up like the stars. Mirah had relied on nothing but her webbed map, which had now become more of a tree, and what she was physically capable of. There was no trickery, no outside tools or help, nothing.

Yet there was something she'd left on the table this whole time, intentionally of course.

Her 'telekinesis'. The half of her abilities that she'd left untouched since she'd gained the capability to see the golden lines. It was something that had been screaming to be used for days as she trained, but she'd ignored it in favour of seeing just how far she could push her understanding of the web, then the tree she held within her mind.

"It's late." Mirah said, her voice almost sounding massive in the cold air of the arena they were in. June looked slightly taken aback by the sudden noise, her mind having long since disregarded speech as an option between bouts. The massively tall woman looked down towards Mirah's emerald eyes and finding herself with an expression of consternation.

The golden lines in her eyes had changed since she'd last taken notice of them, less a weak sprawl of gold, like they were shattered with golden light shining through the gaps. Now, they were filled almost entirely with a powerful looking tree, its branches reaching to the edges of her eyes and past her irises and over the whites of her eyes.

They were unnerving to look at. Not because they were clearly an affectation of Mirah's Link, which could technically be classified as a minor morph, but because even looking at the golden lines made little invasive thoughts appear in her mind. They were thoughts that were almost like dreams, where the moment they were gone, she couldn't remember them, but she was certain that those thoughts existed moments in the future. Her future.

"It is." June said slowly after a long silence, forcing her face back to neutrality. Mirah looked the dark skinned and incredibly tall woman up and down, before returning to her deep eyes.

"One last bout. All stops pulled."

Mirah's words resounded like a clear bell within the large, empty space, almost as a mirror to how they resounded within June's mind. They had competed all day, and the days before that as well, but this felt final, important. This was more than just one more bout, this was the ultimate battle between them, the culmination of both of their rises in power.

No words were said before June moved, both of them standing exactly where they would have started any other bout. June could feel her legs burn as she pushed them far beyond what she'd ever needed to before, directly defying air resistance with her body's strange speed.

June swung her body close to the ground, trying to go for Mirah's thighs, but Mirah could see it coming a mile away at this point, having already stepped back just enough to be outside of June's range. The second movement was a similar, reckless advance towards Mirah, releasing her grip on the floor with her feet and flinging herself forwards.

Mirah could only see June as a black blur of noise in her vision, but if Mirah were relying on her vision to combat against the speed Linked, then she wouldn't be capable of a single evasion. Before the grab was even attempted, Mirah crouched quickly, then launching herself to the side in a quick dive before the other girl had managed the grab.

The immense speed at which this all happened made it almost incomprehensible to anyone who didn't have some sort of perception related link, and even for Mirah, it often felt as if she were taking action far in advance. However, her link was quick to inform her that if she'd waited even a fraction of a second longer, she would easily be caught in June's grip.

June, predictably, missed the grab, but was quick to recoup her stance and make a mad dash for the girl who was only just touching down from her dive. Yet, it was in that short run that something strange happened, something that baffled her so profoundly that after she had tried to kick Mirah's limbs out from under her, which had been combated with a quick roll into a standing position, she could only stand and stare at the green-eyed woman.

June's foot had almost slipped on the mat. Something totally normal to anyone but June, who's entire body was formed in such a way that it was almost an impossibility to slip without intentionally doing so, especially after so much fine control training in the past week.

The moment of stillness only lasted a long time in the mind of a speed Linked, where time may as well be slowed to a halt. However, June rushed forwards with a little bit more gusto than was regular in order to make up for the time she'd lost in her confusion. June went for a push, which Mirah stepped aside of, setting up a perfect opportunity for June.

June's leg whipped out, forcing her to drop some of her height to add to her reach and, in that moment, June was elated. This attack was too fast for Mirah to possibly react to, with her body capable at moving far beyond what Mirah's perception would be able to ascertain. So, when June realised that Mirah had managed to dodge the attack but was also using the loss that June had taken in her height to perform it against her, she was beyond stunned.

Mirah crashed down on June's body, and the surprisingly light girl beneath her crumbled under Mirah's weight pressing on the weakest her stance could be for a moment like this. June fell flat onto the floor, and she gave a desperate launch with her legs to kick Mirah off of her. Mirah gladly took the extra propulsion, though she could feel the sickening crunch as June's surprisingly powerful blow made her ribs crunch in her chest.

Mirah did a short flip, the greatest act of acrobatics that she'd ever managed, sticking the landing and turning towards the sight of the other girl already at her feet and moving in a blur of intense speed right for her, determined to not let her have the seventh evasion Mirah was clearly going for.

And, with one subtle pull of a golden line, June decided to go with a punch, which Mirah simply sidestepped with a preparedness that demolished June's mind.

"I give." Mirah huffed before June could take any of the eight actions that would all end in Mirah at least ending up unconscious. The two women, frozen in time, stood only a metre away from each other, both breathing more heavily than they had in any of the bouts of similar intensity before this final one.

Mirah had done it, and they both knew that it was a wild, astounding victory. As far as either of them were concerned, this was as perfect as Mirah could have possibly performed, even if Mirah had sacrificed her ribs to do so and would have ultimately failed if June had simply continued on.

June didn't need to ask what she'd done to pull it off. All she needed to do was look at the evidence laid before her and take an easy guess. The stars had aligned for Mirah in a way that surpassed logic, and it had created the best result, or close to. This entire time June had thought the girl was just a precog, but this was far beyond that.

She could see in her training partner's eyes that they were both coming to the same epiphany, the same terrifying conclusion.

Mirah couldn't just see the future. She could change it.

June swallowed heavily before quickly turning and pacing towards the door at three times the regular stride. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

No other words were needed, not for a realisation like that.


A/N: Another lovely Patron after such a long dry-streak, thank you Leon E.!

Thanks to my 5-dollar Patron; Thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., and TheBreaker! Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patrons; Jokarun, and Joseph! Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 66: Help

Mirah struggled back to her room, her body and mind having slowly devolved to the mess of exhaustion that you'd expect from having trained more than twelve hours consecutively.

It was possible that it was part of the cost to her link, one that had gone unforeseen until now. Tracker had warned them of that likelihood, that they may just find a physical cost to pulling on that power, but Mirah doubted that was the case here. It was the more familiar kind of exhaustion, though exacerbated thoroughly.

Mirah's trudging steps led to the elevator, and while the linktech machine took its precious few seconds to climb to her floor, Mirah simply pondered. It wasn't something she especially enjoyed doing, more interested in reacting to the world that surrounded her than a possible future that didn't, but her link wasn't exactly giving her much of a choice in that matter.

Honestly, Mirah had started to see the irony in her being the one with a link like this, both precognitive and capable of messing with possible futures. She'd understood the basics of her link for a long time now but watching June's face light up in understanding as she realised that Mirah had manipulated the future itself was oddly reaffirming.

Mirah had shared the woman's shock mostly because of the extent to which she had manipulated the future with her link. Not only was it a future that was—for all practical reasons—extremely unlikely, but it was also something that she'd had to pull together with precision that she'd been unsure her link would even be capable of in the first place.

Mirah, the girl who was so caught up in the present, laser focused on what was happening in the here and now, had been given a link that focused entirely on the possible future. The irony wasn't lost on Mirah, not even slightly. Though, it did make her wonder just what had influenced her gaining this link, what specific concoction of thoughts and circumstances gave her access to such an immensely odd link.

Odd but, as she was coming to realise, potentially incredibly powerful. As of now, there was a lot of limits placed on her ability to be able to do what she'd done with June on repeat. For one, comprehension. It was a particularly important part of what made Mirah capable of even predicting June's movement.

Mirah could slip into the black space that held the webs of golden lines at a moment's notice. It took the effort of a simple blink, giving her immediate access to viewing of those moments of the future. But not all of them were like the tree that she'd slowly pruned June's web into. The simple reason for this was that Mirah had cultivated a repertoire of June's actions and slowly refined likelihoods, leading to the more linear visualisation of the bouts with June.

However, Mirah wasn't going to be able to do the same with everything and everyone. That comprehension was her power, and that would mean that she'd be at a massive disadvantage against situations and people she didn't understand correctly. This would, naturally, call into question the validity of her precognition, or if it was inherently flawed, and the answer to that was yes and no.

She could see everything that someone was capable of in any given moment, and that in itself was an astounding advantage regardless of how you cut the cake. However, it also meant that she could see the infinitesimally unlikely events in someone's web, and each permutation of a single action a thousand times over.

In that way, her 'future sight' as some called it, was more of a vast array of possibilities than a specific future like some were capable of seeing. One man, in the United States, was capable of seeing the best and worst future of any given situation three times a day. His link, as well as many others, were classed in the court of public opinion as a 'kingmaker' link. He reportedly sells one of his charges each day for a sum of money so large that you'd have to recount the zeroes at least a few times.

Mirah did not have something so clear or distinct, and instead of a hard limitation with her future sight, she had too much freedom. Which, while incredibly difficult to navigate, gave her an extremely interesting option for growth, one that was clearer than what you'd expect from a link that was so inherently bizarre.

As the elevator opened to the eighth floor, letting the soft and comforting smell of the clean carpets and the gentle smell of what Aaliyah had told her was lavender, she walked out into the corridor and began to make her way towards her own room. Yet, on the way to room number one, she heard the sound of muffled voices.

This wouldn't be so strange, usually. Ajax and Walter had a history of spending nights together doing whatever Walter was excited about at any given time, but the distinctly crystalline voice intermixed with the more normal sounding female voice coming from Ajax's room was certainly not normal.

Mirah stopped outside Ajax's door, number two, and opened her ears to the sounds within the room, trying to catch what was being said. However, the walls dampened the sound too much for her to realistically be able to understand the words that the voices of Jamie and Julia were sharing. In a last-ditch effort, Mirah opened her mind to the webs of golden lines, then seeking the actions of their mouths, desperately trying to determine what was being said by mouth movements alone.

That was, as Mirah soon found out, a laughable idea. All the got was a deluge of white noise and incomprehensible tongue, lip, and facial muscle contractions that Mirah had no hope of actually understanding. Maybe if she was able to read lips she'd have a vague hope, but the training she'd need to do for that…

Mirah swallowed gently before she gave up on any alternate methods and just decided to take decisive action. Mirah clasped her hand around the doorhandle, not needing to wait for Ajax's keycard to open the door with it being given a grace period to allow others to move through the door within a time after the key had been used.

She swung the door open, revealing a bright room with a straight line of sight to the living room where four people sat. Ajax and Walter sat on their chairs while Julia and Jamie sat comfortably on the couch. Those in the room broke from their conversation, turning to look at the sudden onlooked with surprised expressions, though it quieted to befuddlement when they realised it was Mirah.

Mirah spent a few more moments looking into the room, peering at each of the occupants with neutral eyes, before deciding to move into the room herself, closing the door behind her. Each of them looked at her hesitantly, more surprised by the suddenness than anything more sinister.

She quickly found her usual seat, sitting in it and barging into the conversation with the subtlety of an elephant.

"Uh," Ajax began with a slight hitch in his usually smooth and calm voice, "good evening, Mirah?" What was meant to be a simple greeting instead came out as more of a subtle question than anything.

"Good evening." She replied quietly, looking at the confusion on her teammates faces, also towards the two women who both seemed really uncomfortable with her sudden presence. Walter grimace slightly before opening his mouth to speak, yet before he could the door that Mirah had walked through moments before clicked as it locked itself, the grace period ending and cutting the cord of silence.

"Mirah…" Walter said, recovering from the shock of the intruding sound, "you know you could have just knocked, right?"

Mirah turned to look at him, eyebrows furrowed slightly in a silent question. Though when no answer made itself evident, she just nodded, taking the words and seemingly disregarding them. Of course she knew she could have just knocked, but she hadn't needed to knock before, unless the door was locked.

"What are you talking about?" She said simply, flat tone obliterating the awkwardness of the situation and propelling it forwards.

"Julia and Jamie here were just asking us questions." Ajax said kindly, his voice having regained its calm as the man acclimatised to the presence of his team member. "Mostly about our training so far and what we were up to before training."

Mirah nodded. It was a conversation that seemed pretty standard, even if her own team hadn't really talked about those topics casually. There was far too much darkness in each of their pasts for them to break the topic so casually. Each time the topic had come up, one bombshell or another had been launched and subsequently landed on the group dynamic for at least a while. The same had happened only days before with Aaliyah's own past being unveiled.

The scarred girl turned towards the other two women in the room, giving them a questioning gaze like she had to Walter. Both of them tensed to some degree, with Julia's discomfort being less noticeable than Jamie's by a lack of a face to emote upon.

"Well, uh, yeah!" Julia said quickly, trying to surf the wave that was being given to her, "We were just interested in knowing how all this came about, you know? It's not normal for Undefineds to get training in Australia, let alone sponsored with enough backing to get them up here." Julia let a small appendage form on her surface, quickly gesturing to the room and the floor that it was on.

"Was it a corp?" Jamie blurted, the words bubbling out of her like a shaken up soft drink. Immediately Mirah twigged to the other girl's goal. This wasn't just a friendly conversation; this was an information gathering attempt. Mirah wasn't the only one who realised this, and in a moment, Walter's expression soured. Not into hostility, mind, but the man's quiet features became a little harder, more impassive than Mirah had seen on him even when they'd been having emotional conversations.

"No." Walter said clearly, taking the reins from Ajax and inserting himself more assertively than he'd been outside of dire, personal moments. "We haven't been told who we've been sponsored by."

"You haven't been told, or you haven't been told?" Jamie said quickly, dropping the pretences and moving onward with this line of thinking. Julia, in as good a rendition of mortification as possible, reached out and slapped the other girl on the shoulder. Apparently, it'd been hardly enough to make the scaled girl even blink.

"We don't know who our sponsor is. We want to find out, but there aren't many ways for us to actually get that information, not legitly." Walter continued, not allowing the annoyance in his chest reach his face. For some reason, it was the subtle accusation of him being a liar that had riled him up. The other part of that equation was that she was effectively implying that they were here under gang money, and that was just about as offensive as it got to Walter.

"Why?" Julia questioned gently, taking over from her abrasive friend, "It doesn't really make much sense for some to front up the probably ridiculous amounts of money to set you up here with the trainers you have for no reason."

"It doesn't," Ajax intoned, his voice deep with contemplation, "Walter did some math the other day and came up with somewhere in three million–"

"Thirty million." Walter said quickly, interrupting the other man before scratching at his clean-shaven face awkwardly, "Including estimates on Willem and Tracker's fees."

Even Mirah was flabbergasted by that number, despite not having the greatest grasp on money, having never used it more than a few times in her days in squalor. Thirty million was a number that handily surpassed Mirah's comprehension, leaving her hopelessly trying to understand just how large a number that was, and what it could possibly buy.

"God damn." Jamie whispered, the visible parts of her face slowly draining of their colour as the words leaked from her mouth.

"Indeed." Walter said with an expression that just about screamed 'I told you so', "If we knew who it was, or what company it was, then it'd probably be advantageous for us to just come out with it, scare off some of the more… hostile trainees."

Walter's words were pointed and left not much up to question. Jamie visible grimaced, feeling the burn from her own misguided inquiry. Though even still, Mirah could see the deep-seated confusion int eh other girl's eyes. It was a mystery, for sure, and even Mirah was starting to get annoyed with it hanging over their heads constantly.

"They paid to have a team of Undefineds put together." Mirah said, breaking the silence that she'd held since inciting the conversation in the first place. "And the AASAU broke their rules to make it happen. They are 'Big Fish'."

With that succinct breakdown of their situation, laying those cards on the table and displaying the few points of understanding that they had, the two girls were left with the same burning question that Mirah and the rest of her team had been sitting with since this all began.

"I– Well, sorry." Jamie said with a little bitterness, but quickly powering forwards with an adjustment of the thick rimmed, circular glasses perched atop her nose, "But… uh…" There was a slight groan from beside her, Julia's voice chiming with its crystalline quality.

"What she means to say is, 'Would you like us to try and help?'"


A/N: Annuda won. Hope you're all havin a good one!

Thanks to my 5-dollar Patron; Leon E. Large thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; Dyson C., TheBreaker, and Victor! Huge thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! Massive thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., Joseph, and PortlandPhil!

If you want to support me and receive 90 total chapters of my stories, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 67: Confidence

The arena that the two teams had trained in for a week was eerily quiet, in comparison to the harsh sounds of fighting that had filled it at most hours of the day. Today, only two members of the teams remained within the arena, Ren and Ajax.

Even though they continued to fight, and Ajax continued to make his point about being capable of winning the vast majority of the time, the drive behind it had quelled significantly. There was good reason for this of course, neither of the two men being one to deny themselves a good bit of training.

It was Saturday. Just a regular old Saturday that would pass like any other day in the week, except for the fact that tomorrow was different. Sunday was the day of the match, at midday sharp.

Ajax wasn't going to pretend that he knew or cared for the politics that underlaid the way that their opposing team was being decided. In fact, maybe none but Aaliyah was actually privy to the progress that Willem and Tracker had made on that front since it'd been decreed that they would need to partake in the combat training matches.

They had known that the match would take place on a Sunday, but when they had been told this, long ago, it'd felt like years away. The idea was almost ethereal to them, and maybe that's partly why they were capable of dealing with it all with so much bluster and confidence. Instead of simply being thrust into combat with an already advanced team—Baxter and his team having been trained for much longer than they had—this time the team that they would face wouldn't be much more experienced than themselves.

In comparison, it was almost achievable, even if they had needed to ditch almost all conventional training with Willem and theory study with Tracker to do it. They had trained hard, taking advantage of the extremely beneficial situation that Willem had set up for them with David, or Osmium's, help.

They'd all risen in strength much faster than any of them had imagined, with even Willem occasionally showing some minor signs of surprise. The gruff-faced man was decidedly difficult to impress in such a way. Ajax might not know who Willem was, just another mystery that they had yet to uncover the barest truth of, but it was obvious that he had been around for a long time.

He was powerful, probably the most generally powerful person in the building probably only rivalled by David. He was older, older than the average age of a Linked by a large margin. If he was a trainer, then he wasn't some poor sod that had Awakened recently as the age demographic for Linked slowly widened. The likely reason was that he was old guard, probably having been Linked long than they'd been alive.

Even at a quick glance, the man was experienced. He just about oozed confidence in the way he approached all of this, even when he was being thrown so far off the intended route for their training. He seemed capable of taking just about everything in his stride and moving forwards without a hint of hesitation.

It had made it infinitely easier to follow the man, to simply follow what he told them to do and to reap the benefits of his occasional words of advice. Now, however, they were only mere moments away from the reality that would face them as the future raced to meet them. Fighting, matches, mystery, injury…

They'd tasted it for a moment with the fight against Baxter's team, the grudge match that'd apparently been a month in the making. It had blindsided them, and they had been totally unprepared for anything near that level of combat. The most competent between all of them had been Walter, and that had been an ugly fight no matter how you had looked at it.

Now, though, they had developed significantly, becoming far more competent overall. Now, Ajax was even somewhat confident that he'd be able to go toe to toe with the speedy dickhead, though whether he'd be able to win wouldn't be a sure bet. Though the plan seems to be that Willem will do everything in his power to leave the best till last, which means that by then, weapon combat will be on the table.

Ajax could use his axe in training, but it wasn't something that he was allowed within the actually matches, not until they were permitted to use weapons. Thankfully, Ajax's link wasn't predicated upon the actual use of his axe, and it could just be hanging on his hip and he'd be able to use his strength just fine.

It was a bit backwards, in Ajax's opinion. There were examples like Walter and the telekinetic, who hardly needed weapons to be deadly as all get out, but at the same time, the idea of giving someone like June a knife or baton would be mortifying. The death she could sow would be immense, and it'd all happen in the blink of an eye.

The two men had trained late into the night unknowingly, leaving them tired and more than willing to just leave the arena in silence, only to grab a decent meal before heading back to their respective rooms with barely a wave in each other's direction. Whether it would be the last time that they'd train together wasn't strictly important, and they may very well continue to do so despite not being commandeered by Willem and David's whim.

Ajax entered his own room a moment later, the door clicking open with a quick swipe of his keycard, letting him stumble into his room wearily. He wasn't exhausted, of course, he hadn't done enough exercise for him to truly be tired, but just the thought of tomorrow was tiring enough to promote the cloud of weariness hanging over his head.

He took his quick shower before bed, neglecting to wash his thick, brown hair like he might've on his normal schedule. Ajax just didn't have the brain power to sit and desperately try and dry his head of long hair before he went to bed. It was something that took almost no attention at all, but today it was just too much.

The moment that Ajax hit the hay, he was put in that strange space between sleep and consciousness, floating just inches above the surface of the lake of unconsciousness. As he skimmed across the surface, the slight whispers of dreams and thoughts flittered through his brain like an overheard conversation.

It was a place of strange comfort, but even as Ajax slowly skimmed the water deeper and deeper, there was a resigned feeling in the back of his mind. An acceptance that tomorrow would come, with all the challenges that it might bring.

Though, if he were being entirely honest, Ajax hoped that they would show the rest of the trainees that, no, they weren't simply going to fall over in a gentle breeze.

He hoped.

---

​

The morning sun split the sky above Melbourne, which wasn't necessarily a rarity, but it was nice for what was meant to be a somewhat tense day.

Aaliyah was just about as ready as she could get for the day, having taken the entire day before off, just to sleep and rest as much as possible before she was to fight her little heart out. She'd worked with Tracker to some degree, mostly just sending a message between each other every now and then while Tracker and Willem found them an opponent for the match.

When she'd figured out who it was going to be, she'd tried to grab as much information on them as possible, and was pleasantly surprised with their luck, and their opponent's lack thereof.

The other team had been here for quite a while longer than them, but still ranked deep into the lowest numbers there was here. It was almost impressive that they'd managed to remain so lowly ranked, but they weren't sponsored, and it seems like most of them were there on their own dime, or maybe paid for under the promise of a government or army position.

You'd think that the army would do their own training, and Aaliyah had heard that they sometimes do, but apparently military Linked still undergo training at the AASAU as part of their requirements to be let into the forces. It was odd, and Aaliyah wasn't going to pretend to understand exactly why it was done that way, but the likely answer was just good old bureaucracy.

The team of four were all men, again putting them as somewhat of a rarity, especially since there was a roughly sixty forty split between women and men in AASAU training. Mostly likely reason for that was that the men all ended up in gangs, and much fewer women took that route. Though it was hardly as if working for a corp was much better than being involved in a gang.

They didn't really have specifically interesting links either. Except for one of them, Aaliyah supposed. The leader was just a little stronger than average, at least in comparison to Ajax. He did have quite the regeneration, putting him at an impressive level in that category, though it still wouldn't matter for the sake of the fight.

The second team member could apparently throw things extremely accurately, which she could imagine worked with other things you had to aim, such as guns. Though, while it might be impressive if he had a weapon, he was limited to paint balls for the practice. If you were hit by them in an unguarded area, then you were instantly defeated in the match, so they adjusted for it somewhat. As soon as the man was given an actual weapon, like a slingshot at least, then he'd become scary really quickly. The third was, again, not that impressive. He could redirect physical blows, even really big ones, but against anything else he was almost useless.

The fourth was where things got interesting, at least for Aaliyah. Sure, they weren't necessarily going to be someone particularly strong in combat, and the man was only slightly more physically powerful than a regular Linked, but it was the sheer utility that his link held that pulled her interest.

He had the ability to create a clone of himself. As far as she could tell, it was only one, and there was no infinite propagation as there was a time limit, but it came with its upsides. They were distinct beings from one another but held a complete telepathic link that seemed uninterruptible. Aaliyah had no idea how someone with a link like that ended up in the lowest possible training bracket, but the truth was sitting right there in front of her.

The mountain of possibilities that his link held from espionage, to literally almost anything was immense, and as her mind started to delve into the darker possible uses for the link, she almost began to scare herself. The idea of a suicide bomber, totally incapable of being significantly hurt by their bombs, was something that kept itself ultimately present in her mind.

Others had to have seen his link in action, so maybe it wasn't as scary as she thought, especially since she was getting a lot of this information straight from an AASAU science server that she'd gotten access to. She was trying to get into the more restrictive stuff, but the office workers that she'd been able to phish hadn't had access to those servers.

So, instead of wasting time, she'd managed to phish one of the on-hand scientists that they have, one ironically specialised within linktech IT infrastructure, and broken into the info that they have on the bulk of the trainees and their links.

Funnily enough, Aaliyah couldn't even get access to her own files on that server, with the different grade of 'sponsor level' guaranteeing more secrecy. Files of those being trained by Willem, or even anywhere close to that, were probably held on their own private servers, or in physical copies. The fact that she could even get so far into the infrastructure was almost hilarious. If she didn't already know that files on sponsorships, even for the smallest of sponsors, were always held in physical files rather than any digital file, then she'd already know who was sponsoring their team. It'd be that easy.

Aaliyah grumbled for a bit, feeling the time slowly leak by as it went from early-morning, to mid-morning, and then quietly to the point where she needed to eat now or she'd miss her breakfast before the fight. She struggled out of bed, quickly throwing on some comfortable training clothes over the underwear that she had slept in.

She spent another few minute finishing the necessary components of her morning routine before leaving the room with a little pep in her step. Today, she almost dared to be confident about their outcome in the match, and while she thought that she might be jinxing it by thinking that way, it was almost an unshakable feeling.

Confidence wasn't something she'd genuinely held within herself for a long time, not since she'd held complete confidence in destroying her own father's empire. But now, this was a confidence that wasn't marred by darkness and hate, but one that was almost pleasant to have within, reassuring and calming against the screaming chaos that constantly surrounded her.

Confidence was nice.


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