Fixture in Fate (Superhero/Worm-like)

[Sarius]

Chapter 28: Awakenings

"Limitations." Tracker said, ponderously, "Limitations, as we have discussed before, mostly lay in the specific way that a link uses the power it is offered. But, there are a few limitations that generally," Tracker paused for a moment, giving even more emphasis to the word, "generally apply." The woman clicked the small remote in her hands.

"The most common is simple. You generally can't use your own link inside someone else's body." The graphic behind here displayed two men, where one tried to use an ice formation power inside and outside the other man. When it was tried to use inside, the other man's innards were covered in a nebulous golden glow.

"So, you can't summon things inside people, or necessarily suck the water out of their flesh. But sometimes that is possible. Either because you have no power left, which all of you are infinity types—or close enough—so that won't be a problem, or there is someone whose link comes with a minor nullification aspect to it." She looked towards a slightly dumbfounded team and sighed.

"If you run out of energy, or have it blocked from you accessing it, then you are vulnerable to Linked doing whatever they want with your organs. If someone's link is capable of bypassing the inherent barrier that having power within you poses, then they are classed as low-level nullifiers. These Linked can be extremely dangerous." It wasn't hard for any of the team to think of an example of a link that would be terrifying if it could be used directly inside someone else's body.

"This also means that non-Linked are vulnerable to this. So, be careful if you are using your link to create or 'conjure' anything at all, especially if you are interacting with anyone that have no link of their own, you could accidentally kill them quite easily." She made sure to give Walter a longer glance, making him sweat a little as he thought of the pure destruction of the pillar of fire he could summon burning inside someone.

"Another limitation you may find is that some Linked had natural resistances to your link. For example, I have met a collection of linked that I cannot track using my link. No matter how close I am, or how much I focus on them, there is something fundamental about the way that their link works that prohibits me from viewing them." Tracker looked over the team for a moment, realising that they were a little high-strung on emotion at the moment. Mirah and Aaliyah specifically seemed one shade of distraught or another.

"More relatable examples may be Mirah, Aaliyah and Ajax." The two girls and one man perked up from their half-listening, though Aaliyah hid it significantly better than Mirah—and likely remembered the lecture regardless. Ajax was always listening and attentive, though even he had been lacking a little of the quiet enthusiasm he usually brought to the table.

"Mirah's is a little more abstract, but the limited telekinesis may very well be impeded by someone who your link simply can't sense, or their link nullifying your ability to interact with them. Aaliyah's is simple, some people may just be immune to the emotional effects that you are capable of—though you have hardly tested with anything other than anger as of yet, and that particular emotion seems localised to you. And Ajax could just have his axe taken away from him." The two girls nodded woodenly, the assessment of their powers helpful, even if it was abstract. Ajax just grinned the obvious limitation of his link, being something he'd had in mind for a while.

"Then there are counters too, of course. Aaliyah will need to be worried about emotion controllers in general, it could very easily change your link into a boon for the enemy instead. Walter would flounder against someone who can simply avoid or tank his damage, especially with his currently limited repertoire. Ajax's counter could be any number of other physically based Linked opponents and Mirah is the same, just across the board."

Tracker stopped and sat on the top of her table, having come to the point where the mood of the group was significantly impeding the flow of the lesson. She sat and stared at each of the team, waiting until they all noticed that she had stopped and was staring at them. Mirah looked confused and conflicted, underneath the stoic expression that Tracker had learned to peel away when she assessed the girl. Ajax sat next to her, his large form sitting with remarkably good posture, arms crossed with a general look of consternation on his face.

Mirah and Ajax had been in a small conflict, but both parties were introspective enough to at least realise that they weren't directly at odds with each other. They were having a disagreement of perspective, something that Tracker had helped Mirah come around to with that horrible little worm she'd planted in her head.

Walter and Aaliyah were smouldering, Walter visibly so. Tracker had been dealing with furious Linked for the better part of her entire life, she knew all the signs of anger on the almost inherently damaged preternatural ability users. Walter was the more classic example—he was pissed at Ajax. Of course, Tracker knew why—with how real the threat of the High Order is to Walter and his parents and Ajax so blatantly stepping on their toes without a second thought. Aaliyah was the opposite now that she had aired her grievance with Ajax. She was still angry, but she hid it behind an air of neutrality even if Tracker suspected that underneath the conniving woman's clothes her body was flush with dots of red, the anger only just being restrained from her face.

"So, you had your first real argument, then?" Tracker said neutrally. She didn't receive a direct reply, but she didn't need one. "That's good. I had expected one earlier, but now is better than later. The teams that don't argue never come together, the ones that argue incessantly fall apart. Such is the nature of teams." Walter, specifically, seemed a little surprised that the team weren't getting a scolding for fighting or disagreeing and Tracker could see why. More than one of the other trainers in this place would have done just that, but it was always a futile gesture.

"Well then, now that I have your attention," Tracker clicked the remote and the image behind her turned off, leaving only herself for the group to focus on, their minds a little sharper now, "we need to talk about the very topic that make most Linked hightail it out of the room as soon as its broached. Awakenings." And, just as Tracker expected, the mood of the room soured just as quickly as she said the word. No-one liked talking about theme, there is almost never a truly good experience with an Awakening, and nobody wants to relive those memories.

"Let's play softball with it for a second." Tracker relented, "Why do we call it an 'Awakening'? Even if we could call it 'linking' or something just as fitting?" She looked to the crowd of four—well three, since Mirah couldn't know the answer if she tried.

"Because it feels like one." Aaliyah said eventually, her voice cutting through the heavy atmosphere like a razor. Tracker nodded, happy she managed to get any response at all.

"Precisely. Though not all forms of Awakenings come with that feeling, the vast majority of Awakenings feel exactly as if you were suddenly enlightened. Not always a good sort of enlightenment, but one all the same." She paused to let them process, "And also because that was what reached the press and they ran with it." That got a snort out of some of the team at least.

"So then, the types of Awakenings. There are three or so categories, and there are some derivatives within them, as always. First!" She clicked the remote, pulling up a graphic of a man sleeping in bed and a thought bubble floating above his head, containing esoteric imagery. "Is the most common. Awakening within a dream is how the vast majority of the Linked population come to be—but that doesn't mean that their experiences within the dream are at all similar." With the grudging interest of her small class, Tracker clicked to her next slide, pie chart. The interested eyes of the team, most of which had never looked into the hard data behind Awakenings before, frowned at the simple graph before them. There were only three delineating colours within this chart, each labelled with a small legend at the bottom of the graphic.

"Of those that Awakened during a dream; fifty-two percent experienced a vison without a person or identifiable object, many of which described it as 'standing within the universe'. After that, twenty-eight percent experience a memory that is significantly altered and contains some relevance towards their link. Lastly, twenty percent experience an interaction with a being. This being had been recorded to be Gods of various religions, beings that embody certain things or sometimes a being that is unknowable and incomprehensible." Tracker let the graph stay there for a moment. She could see the eyes of the trainees focus when it was their own category being called. Aaliyah was in the second category and Mirah and Walter were within the third, though Mirah's eyes became almost fearful at the talk of an unknowable being.

"We all know that Awakenings typically coincide with both hardship and teenage to young adult age groups, and while there are more outliers than ever, the majority stay ever strong. Awakenings typically occur directly after or close to moments and situations of great trauma—though some Awaken belatedly for whatever reason. Our only guess as to why this is done within a dream is because the mind is more malleable to the rush of power, and it's safer for it to be done while sleeping. However, some undergo an Awakening while conscious." Ajax's expression perked up with interest at his own experience being called upon.

"Our best bet for why this happens is that a person is 'slated' to Awaken, but when they are faced with a dangerous situation, their brains enact the Awakening early. We don't understand how Awakening works enough in general to know anything for sure. In the instant the conscious Awakener receives their link, they are flooded with a massive amount of power which is typically used to try and deal with the dangerous situation they Awakened in. However, this initial power is not necessarily the actual strength they will be afforded after the initial burst of power. Many go from being potential natural disasters to very little more than a regular human." Everyone's eyes narrowed, a faint air of disbelief. From being equivalent to an earthquake to being totally normal? That was a big step down.

"The final category are the Remembrances, though they are prohibitively rare and are almost always considered part of the first category. If a Linked cannot remember their Awakening at all—or show signs of not even knowing they had one—then they are likely part of this category and are typically at great risks to themselves or others. We have no good data on why that is." The room went silent as all of the trainees resisted the urge to stare at Mirah but Tracker relieved them of the urge as she quickly moved on to the last, and shortest topic.

"The last topic we will talk about for the day are Morphs, and they are exceedingly simple. They are Linked who, after experiencing an Awakening, change physically as part of their link. A large minority of Linked have morphed on biological level to allow for their link to function—such as a hypercognitive's brain—but there are a few that change very significantly, sometimes to where they cannot even be biologically called human anymore. Why this happens to some is just as unknowable as why people Awaken to different types of links. A particularly terrifying example of this is Gigantesca; a Brazilian woman who Awakened to become a mindless stone being, standing at almost four-thousand metres tall—she now perpetually walks the world with seemingly no rhyme or reason." Tracker looked at the class one final time, the final example she gave being a harrowing one. The sort of example that made you think 'that could have been me?'

The class was dismissed for the day, the weary trainees either going up to their rooms or, in the case of Walter, down to the Underground.

---​

Ajax was left alone in his room. The day, which had been short by most metrics, had somehow drained him of any energy he had to train with that stupid silver ball that was sitting on his bedside table, menacing him.

He had spent hours and hours the day before trying to get his strength more consistent, and he technically had—though the consistency he had gained was pitiful. He had seen Walter make his way down to the Underground, an unusual move in the boy's pretty standard routine. Walter had always been enthusiastic about training, though he never seemed like it in the mornings. But the deceptively motivated man was now even going out of his way to train more than he had to, which seemed like it was going to be more than Ajax as well—at least for today.

Today, Ajax had too many things to think about. Too many confused emotions and crossed wires—arguments and conflicting views. But even still, Tracker's words rang true for Ajax, that teams had to argue. In Ajax's eyes, any interaction that involved emotions connected the ragtag team that had been thrown together at what seemed like the drop of a hat.

He just wished it didn't need to create such a conflicting whirlwind of emotion.

Just as Ajax was about to flop back on his bed and take a nap, there was a concise knock at the door, making him pause.

"Walt? You can come in, man." Ajax called, but received no answer. After a long moment of waiting, Ajax walked out of his bedroom and to the door, opening it to reveal Mirah, standing there silently with those piercing green eyes.

"We need to talk." She said, as Ajax couldn't help but let out a massive sigh. Apparently this day just didn't want to end.


A/N: A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 29: Teammate

Mirah disliked that she had begun to feel compelled towards emotion. She hated the uncomfortable nature of her existence now, removed from her trash pile in the side streets of the city. She had opened herself up to Tracker and even been unable to restrain herself from mouthing off at Ajax.

And even now she felt compelled to confront Ajax, as she sat on the couch in his room. Something that she couldn't even have dreamt of doing the day before. She felt any of ten different emotions, and it was hurting her beyond belief. Like waking up from years of being asleep, only to find yourself in a world you don't recognise one.

"Are you okay, Mirah?" Ajax's gentle voice said, though even in his gentlest voice you could hear the depth and power that his voice could assume, if he wanted it to. Mirah tried to snap her mind from its emotional fugue, but she couldn't. There was just so much to feel and process, and Mirah didn't understand any of it.

"No. I am not." She replied tersely. "Of course I am not okay." The large man recoiled a little in surprise at the force in Mirah's words.

"Okay," he said placatingly, "how can I help?" Mirah paused, her frustration abated with momentary uncertainty.

"I don't know." She replied, making man's powerful brow scrunch in consternation.

"But you wanted to talk?" He asked, thoughtfully. It would have sounded condescending, if he weren't so completely honest. Mirah realised that she wouldn't have been able to handle anything less than complete honesty right now.

"Yes. I want to ask why." Ajax waited for her to complete the sentence, in case there was anything else, but he already knew what the strangely distraught girl in front of him wanted to know.

"Why am I finding that I want to be a 'Hero'?" Mirah nodded succinctly. He had never seen so much confusion and anxiety expressed through an almost entirely stoic face before. But now that he had, Ajax came to the realisation that this had been coming for a while. He had thought Mirah to be in a similar state of cluelessness about the world as he was, but she was in a totally different world than the rest of the team. As his mind reframed the girl's existence within the team, he felt his heart break slightly, and then a little more when he realised that he knew basically nothing of her past at all.

There was a fundamental breakdown of trust between the team, if it had ever existed. No-one knew anyone else's past or who they really were, the only person even making the effort had been Walt—when he had talked about his parents—and Ajax had even given him a hard time for it. Ajax had thought himself to be the person putting his best foot forward, but he was kidding himself this whole time. He looked up to see that Mirah was waiting patiently for him to speak, even as the emotions roiled inside her eyes.

"Because I failed in the past." He said, feeling the old wound split wide open even as he said it—the sorrow, fear, anger, and grief flooding back into his mind, the same forceful emotions that had led him towards his solitary life in the woods. The sudden rush of emotion in Ajax's voice startled Mirah, but she stayed quiet, her hands deadly still at her sides as she tried to relax her tense body on Ajax's couch.

"My mother and father weren't good people, and I was the product of a drug fuelled accident. I lived with them for a few years as a young child, but when my dad did something stupid to make the police raid the house, they found me locked in a room in a days old diaper, barely alive while my parents were getting themselves high." Ajax's voice had regained much of its composure, but a low, sorrowful note permeated his speech in a way Mirah had never heard in a voice before.

"They moved you?" She said, faint memories of children being brought to the orphanage she had lived in for much of her early life. Memories of having to help young children so weak they couldn't walk, helping them eat their food at the long tables of the dining room. Ajax nodded.

"To my grandparents, in the country. They owned a small farm by themselves, raising livestock on a small scale—enough to sustain their existence. I spent much of my childhood out there, amongst the animals—watching them be born, live, and then eventually die. I went to school like normal, did what I had to do to get through the year. But when I was around ten, my mother and father managed to get shared custody back between them and my grandparents. They had cleaned up, apparently." Mirah could tell from the man's bitter tone that they hadn't. Ajax took a deep breath, sinking further back into his own seat for comfort.

"I don't know how they did it, but they managed to convince someone that I would be better off living with them during the weeks. So that became life for a few more years, spending every moment of those weekdays wishing I was anywhere else but here," he gestured widely—to Melbourne in general, Mirah supposed. "One day, when I came home from school to hear them having drug fuelled sex in their bedroom, with no food in the fridge, and all the money gone—I wondered if they'd even realise I was missing, if I left right then and there." Ajax grinned widely, his coal black eyes glittering with a mischievousness, before dulling a little with his next sentence.

"Three months later, my father died from OD'ing on whatever he'd taken that day, and my mother got herself put in a mental ward. It was a whole lot easier to convince people that I was better off living with the grandparents that had been taking care of me through all of that." Ajax deflated a little, but chuckled wryly before saying, "The only thing my mum did was give me a cool first name, and my dad only gave me his last name. Ajax Nephus." He said, arcing his hands over his head sarcastically. Mirah's only response was to scrunch her brow questioningly.

"How did you fail?" She asked, but even though the words themselves were blunt, her voice was almost soft—even if her expression remained at its stony resting place. Ajax rubbed at his forehead before he lurched out of his chair and silently dawdled around his kitchen—opening the large fridge that was flush with the rest of the cabinets surrounding it. Mirah had never used her own fridge, but she had looked inside it, finding it empty. Ajax's was pretty sparse as well, though there were a few bottles of alcohol—something Mirah was used to the sight of, though usually empty.

"Want one?" Ajax asked, holding the bottle up, making it seem small in his massive hands. Mirah was about to decline, when something inside stopped her. 'Why not?' It said quietly, and Mirah decided that maybe she should follow the advice. She nodded, and before long Ajax sat opposite her, both of the teammates holding their own bottle of beer.

It tasted terrible, but Mirah had drunk and ate far worse.

"I had finished high school that year, and I was hoping to work that whole summer with my grandfather. My grandparents were getting really old, and as much as my grandpa would have loved to work until he walked right into his grave, he could barely walk for a few hours a day. We were slowly coming to the realisation that I would be running the farm, sooner rather than later." Ajax took a long swig of the bottle in his hand, draining the brown bottle by almost a third. Mirah took an accompanying sip, letting the terrible tasting liquid slip down her throat. Ajax winced before the next sentence but managed to find it within himself to start.

"It was a really hot day, and my grandparents were struggling in the heat. The house had terrible air conditioning, so I drove us all into to town. It wasn't a big town, but it was large enough that it had a shopping centre, even a movie theatre. On a day as hot as that, everyone was in town trying to run away from it." He took another swig from the bottle, the emotions he'd pushed down earlier resurfacing themselves as he drew closer and closer to the event.

"We were just leaving the theatres when the sirens started going off." The fear in Ajax's voice hit Mirah dead in the chest, the harrowing fear so similar to what she experienced when she closed her eyes at night. She struggled to stop her throat from convulsing with the emotion, but Ajax's eyes were focused on the rim of the bottle.

"We checked the news and the town over had been wiped out. The Wastelanders were going on another spree, and they were headed right for us. Everyone knew that it was a possibility—the Wastelanders had gone on tirade after tirade for years, but this little town had always been safe from them. There was a shelter built back when they started their ritual culling, but it hadn't been maintained or upgraded in years, decades even." His hand was shaking, Ajax noticed. He tried to make it stop but, after one last swig of beer, he placed the bottle down on the table—leaving his hand to tremor atop his thigh. Mirah's eyes watched the man intently, her own hands white-knuckled in their grip on her bottle.

"A few hundred people made it to that shelter, and we waited in the darkness—the electrical system had long since stopped working. In the distance we could hear the horrible sounds as the earth dried and cracked, the air becoming hotter and barren of moisture, and the terrible sound of everything decaying. Then it was silent." The air in Ajax's room was suddenly just as tense as it was all those years ago in that bunker. Ajax realised that he was reliving it, the memory in his mind almost tangible, the heavy breathing of those around him, the few moments of quiet spawning a crazed hope within his chest. Just maybe—maybe this one time they would leave.

"Then the stone of the bunker cracker, aging hundreds of years and decaying in seconds. To my left, hanging on the wall was a red fire axe, so I grabbed it in the vain hope that I could defend myself. I don't know how many died as the bunker fell apart, rock and metal wasting away and eventually turning into piles of dust. Anyone that was still alive could barely see against the sunlight, the dry air pulling the life out of our bodies. And then when we saw them standing atop the rubble, looking down on us like ants.

"Then they burned the anthill."

Ajax grabbed the sheathed axe that had been sitting on the table, pulling it out of its holster and placing it across his thighs, sadly caressing the chipped red paint on its head. He could barely hold the axe, even as it sat on his legs, the trembling so pervasive that it would rock his whole body if he let it.

"I Awakened as everyone melted around me. The dryness was so intense that their skin instantly cracked and flaked away, the earth below, crumbling and dropping them into the crevices. And then their bodies aged, their flesh rotting and wasting away before their eyes. It was all over before I even called upon my link." Ajax looked up at Mirah, right into her vivid green eyes—he knew his face was the very same one he had seen every morning in the mirror, the one that held every terrible emotion he had.

"I was left in the dusty remains of everyone I knew and loved, of the people I had Awakened to protect. And all I managed to protect was myself."

Who had started crying first was irrelevant. The timeline of events didn't matter anymore. Ajax had believed they would, before this—that he would have to manufacture the closeness between himself and the rest of his teammates. He thought that every exact step would be important, like a computer would log how it played a chess game. But as Ajax's conscious mind woke for split seconds between his sobbing, every time he would see something and not remember how it happened. He didn't remember when another beer had made it into both of their hands, or when it was that Mirah had hugged him in her best attempt to console, or why Mirah had begun telling her own story—her words laden with just as much sadness and loss as his own.

He had felt it at the middle of the day, the little spark of closeness that had jumped between the group—chemistry that they were so heavily lacking. He had wondered what he had to do to attain it, to put it in a jar and keep it. How many nights had he worried about it, now? Tossing and turning, running situations through in his head, questioning what he should do to win the team over.

But now, as he and Mirah sat across from each other, emotions emptied from the hours of reliving the worst of both of their lives—of why Mirah ran from her orphanage, when she had seen that poor little girl, and the look on Mirah's face when she said she'd do anything to go back and kill that man. Ajax could only barely remember himself saying the words, but he knew they would stay in his mind forever.

"Careful, you're beginning to sound like a hero."

When even Mirah had laughed, a shockingly beautiful sound, Ajax knew he had truly found it.

His first teammate.


A/N: A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 30: Anger

Aaliyah was angry.

She was angry a lot, but today she was angry for a multitude of reasons. First of all, when she had walked out of her room in the morning, she had been confronted by Ajax's door being wide open and Tracker—dressed in her well-fitting black suit—helping an incredibly hungover Mirah towards the bathroom. Ajax had popped his head out to give a cursory explanation of what had happened when she asked.

Aaliyah was surprised that Mirah had even confronted the man, she certainly hadn't pegged her as the type to confront someone or try to work something out with words. Not that Aaliyah could read the girl very well, mind. What had tipped her off that something more than just Mirah getting wasted had happened, was when Ajax wouldn't stop smiling—the whole way through the conversation.

Ajax always tried to wear a smile, in some form or another. He was a personable person, it came naturally to him, unlike herself. However, he was smiling a full smile today—much happier than she had seen him for days at least. Aaliyah's mind had instinctively narrowed the options down.

One; they had sex.

Two; Ajax thought Mirah being drunk was funny.

Three; they had formed some sort of connection.

Number one is so far off the table that it was on the other side of the planet. Ajax was also the last person to take advantage of someone who was drunk—his morals simply wouldn't let him. Mirah was already reserved about her appearance, for clear reasons. So, no.

Number two was more plausible, but Ajax wouldn't find that funny. He'd deem it too cruel, like kicking someone while they were already down. Plus, if he did find it funny, he'd probably be talking about it in that way with Aaliyah, which he wasn't.

So that left number three, and that made Aaliyah mad. But what made her even madder, was that she didn't know why she was so angry about it. She could feel the little red spots surface on her skin again, the insidious little things appearing like an allergic rash. The frustration of not being able to push them down quick enough led to even more anger, the spots surfacing from within her like trapped air in water.

"Stop." An ironclad voice rung out within the small training room, making Aaliyah's eyes snap open and the anger dissipate when she saw her coach's stern visage. Willem let his eyes bore into Aaliyah's own, and she could feel them on her even when she turned her face from him.

"This is the fourth time today." He said quietly, "It usually takes you much longer to come to a boil, and you usually simmer for longer at your limit. You are angry."

His voice wasn't a question, or a demand, but a decree. She felt a flush of the red splotches on her skin, painting themselves along her arms like a child had poked her with a paint covered finger, but she pushed them down—not wanting to end up in the infirmary again by Willem's hand.

"Take five." He said quietly, before standing smoothly from his cross-legged position on the floor and walking off and out of the private training room. Aaliyah let a sigh through her lips as she unfurled herself from the awkward position.

She might have turned up her nose at the ridiculousness of her training being little more than sitting on the floor with er eyes closed and breathing exercises—but Aaliyah knew better than to totally disregard a man like Willem, a man as powerful as Willem. It had taken her a few hours of research and learning how to read scientific papers, but Aaliyah had found the science to be at least tangentially in agreement with the stocky trainer.

There was some part of her that wanted to throw the dubious papers displaying transformative results in the man's face, but the softer and more intelligently spoken papers—the ones that obfuscated less behind fancy buzzwords and strange wordings—quietly agreed that there was at least some benefit. Even if that benefit was difficult to understand or quantify.

Aaliyah stood from the mats that they had used for fighting only a few days before and walked towards the Training Room—eyes being drawn to the screens that captured what was happening inside its metal walls.

The displays were brightly lit with a flare of red and yellow, the Asian boy inside only barely visible as he sat in his own pseudo meditative pose beneath the towering flame he produced. The flame was impressive, no matter how you looked at it, and the fact that Walter could produce it as long as he could focus only made it more so. But it came with the distinct downside of being almost stuck at that intensity.

Though, now that Aaliyah looked at it, the boy had made some progress. What was once a towering pillar of flame—burning so brightly that it obscured everything else from the camera's vision—was now a much smaller pillar, only a few feet taller than Ajax was. From almost reaching the high roof of the Training Room, to being an almost reasonable human size was impressive progress. As far as Aaliyah knew, Walter had made by far the most progress out of all the trainees.

Aaliyah herself had increased the amount of time that she could keep herself at her 'angry limit' without trying to kill someone, Ajax had made a miniscule amount of progress doing his squeeze ball thing, and Aaliyah wasn't even sure what Mirah's goal is with the reaction light board. But all of this was still limited, the results lukewarm.

Aaliyah ran a hand over her face with a small amount of exasperation showing through in her expression. Aaliyah was letting her emotions get the better of her and she hated it.

Before it was so easy to hide how she truly under a mask, one that could display any emotion that she so desired. But now it all fell apart at the drop of a hat, not only was her link messing with her ability to put on a convincing mask, but also with a member of the team that was entirely distrustful of her.

She had expected that she would be able to pull the team together around herself, and she had even been somewhat successful at it with Walter. But Mirah had blown her intentions wide open, even making Walter cognizant of Aaliyah's social games. Aaliyah had wanted to pull together the team and use them to get through training, putting forward just the right amount of effort to pass through without worry and just little enough that they wouldn't be exceptional. A team that she'd disappear in and wouldn't be noticed.

Then Ajax had messed with a High Order kid.

Aaliyah had half a mind to pack her bags and run, leaving behind the two idiots who still naïvely believed in any amount of heroism, and Mirah, who looked like she was willing to go along with their farce.

But she didn't leave, even if her bags were packed and hidden inside her drawer—only the bare essentials, like always. She didn't leave even though she knew she was powerless in this group, any social manoeuvre relying on Mirah buying into it. She didn't leave even though she knew that Jeremy Baxter could do any number of heinous things inside the AASAU training facilities and never see repercussion.

The reason she didn't leave was because Willem's words still resounded in her skull, the echo of their impact never truly leaving her mind despite Aaliyah's best attempts.

'If I let you walk out of here, one day I would be forced to come and kill you.'

Willem had destroyed her sense of security that day. The innate belief that she could survive by herself, that she could make do. She had always been in a position of some power, even if that power was over drunk men's wallets in a strip club. But now she had no power, no social string to pull on or favours to cash in, no blackmail that wouldn't blow up in her face mor than it'd help.

The reason she wasn't leaving is because she was scared. Scared of herself, scared of those around her and their motives, what they knew and didn't know. What her teammates would do when she didn't have the ability to significantly influence them. Scared of the eventuality of Aaliyah herself going postal and her link taking over.

Aaliyah pulled herself from her musing, the colours on her skin were confused alternating like a terrible modern art piece; a deep dark-blue, a snivelling green, a venomous yellow all mixing and matching on her skin. But surprisingly, with a distinct lack of red.

"Aaliyah." The short man called from the mats, his stocky body already twisted into a formal meditation position, a remined that the man was more flexible than you'd think. Aaliyah trudged over to the mat, returning to her own sitting position, and closing her eyes like she had so many times before.

She spent a few moments centring herself, allowing her body to relax ever so slightly—a difficult task when the man who sits only a metre from you can and had pummelled you into submission. She took a large breath in, relying on a mental count to dictate the rotation. Breathing in, hold, breathing out, hold.

After twenty seconds, Aaliyah introduced the first angry thought. Today it was Ajax's stupidity, making such an obviously risky move and pissing off Jeremy Baxter. It had made it difficult for Aaliyah to think that entire day, the anger giving way to more anger in a cycle that Aaliyah could only just control. She had almost convinced herself to go to Willem's office and ask him to watch over her, just in case she really escalated, but she couldn't leave herself to someone else's whim like that.

Even now, just sitting in front of the man felt dangerous and revealing. She had danced in front of small crowds of disgusting looking men almost entirely naked on too many occasions to count but sitting in front of Willem made her actually nervous.

The anger rose unbidden, more angry thoughts naturally conglomerating around the first one like magnetism. She could feel the spots on her skin as the vibrant red burned across her skin, as if it'd be actually hot to the touch. Aaliyah tried to stamp down on the rage and anger, but it only fed it—the magnetism so powerful that it was pulling the memories from the past that truly infuriated her.

Her father and the insane dichotomy between the love for his daughters and the man of pure evil he was to the rest of the world. The mother that had left her children at the hands of a monster. The burning hatred she felt in the darkest days, the only that still kept her together, stopped her from falling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Aaliyah could remember the violent satisfaction she'd taken when she crushed everything her father had built under her bootheel, taking down everything she could around him.

Then the scorn and hate that appeared the moment that someone learned her last name, a link to who she was and where she came from. A name that made used to make those on the streets run in fear, and now only cause its bearers to run from those who would take their revenge on them.

Well, there was only one true bearer of that name now, and that was Aaliyah herself.

Aaliyah Flinn, the last surviving daughter of Harry Flinn. The Monarch.

The rage boiled over, the lid of the saucepan exploding from the pressure inside—the scathing hot liquid expanding in bubbles, leaking from the pan rapidly. Aaliyah couldn't control it this time, just like it had been when she had fought Ajax. She tried to force the lid back onto the pan, but the bubbling liquid forced against her with an endless tide, a rush of emotions that made Aaliyah feel as if her mind was on fire.

She could feel her body tensing itself, hearing the calls from Willem as he tried to stop her from escalating further. But it was too late, the red dots had become blotches on her skin, angrily flashing and morphing across her pale features like a two-dimensional lava lamp. The red splotches grew as the flood of hateful and angry memories flooded her mind, the burning red covering the majority of her body underneath her clothes across her arms and legs.

Aaliyah had no control now, she could feel the anger take control of her body, standing against her own will. She could only imagine that it would attack next, trying in vain to kill the absurdly powerful coach she had lost against once before. But Aaliyah was left with a soft discontent in her otherwise fury-soaked mind.

Was this it? Was this all that could be done? Could Aaliyah only wait and watch as her body and mind conspired against her own control? She was still inside herself somewhere, even if she couldn't do much but desperately try and reign in her own anger—an impossible task.

She waited for the sudden darkness to subsume her, Willem's fists knocking her out in a fraction of a second, but it didn't come. She could barely see or hear through the intense fog of red that clouded her senses, but she could feel herself struggling against a grip. Willem was holding her body back and…

Giving her time. Willem was giving her a chance—a moment to prove herself capable of bringing herself down from her disastrous rage. A strange emotion wormed its way into Aaliyah's mind, a bright, light blue contrasting against the raging colour around it. Aaliyah reached out and gently poked at the colour, feeling strangely reassured as she touched it. Like a cool breeze on a warm day, soothing the raging mind with just a little bit of…

Trust.

Aaliyah brought it into herself, guarding it like you would a kindling flame against the wind, and let it grow. It was slow at first, but then it caught onto emotions all of its own—the bond she had shared with her sister, the memories of a small bracelet they had made for each other, long lost as a child does. The light blue expanded on the back of Aaliyah's memories, not doing so much as pushing the red, but gently occupying the space it had, quietly surrounding and herding the rage inside.

There was no force, no stamping out of emotions, simply two separate emotions existing simultaneously. For what was a human that could only feel one emotion at once?

Aaliyah was an animal in a cage of her own design, both stopping herself from experiencing good emotions and viciously taming her anger at once. But with just one other dichotomous emotion, Aaliyah could feel the reason return to her, the strength she had assumed with the rage dimming, but some still remained. Now, though, she was left with a portion of herself with a calm rationality, a trust in herself and in the man in front of her, no matter how tenuous.

Willem waited a while—still gripping the taller girl in restraint—but after a minute where Aaliyah barely moved, he released her from his iron grip, moving back to where he had been sitting. Aaliyah sat up as well, giving the trainer a good look at the colours on her skin.

Red and blue shifted across her skin slowly, the two colours staying close to each other in roughly equal amounts—almost as if they were bonded together. Instead of the overwhelmingly bright red, the colour had mellowed itself a little, becoming a little duller. Across the rest of the skin that had neither red, nor blue, were dots of other colours, the small specs being a new development entirely. There was some nasty looking yellow and green, but a little light grey that almost seemed reliable.

"Good work." Willem said finally, his eyes coming back up to the blonde-haired woman's eyes, the hazel corneas almost displaying relief. "Now, tell me how you did it."


A/N: Wow, so uh, this is chapter 30! Which is a big deal cause now I have a 1:1 between posted chapters and advance chapters on Patreon. FixFate reached chapter 60 over there today, and Unwieldy is almost at chapter 100. This is all really insane, honestly. Either way, I hope you all enjoy.

A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 31: Date Night

Tracker gently placed the screen of her tablet-laptop convertible onto the cushioned sheets of her bed and tried hard to not rub at her done-up eyes with a small amount of frustration.

The day had mostly been all hers, allowed to do any work that she needed from the comfort of her own room, and all that had really happened was Aaliyah's progress in her training and some other bits and pieces amongst the other trainees. After helping Mirah in the morning, Tracker had been able to go to her room and stay there.

She hadn't forgotten that tonight was the night that she was to meet with Chef—someone she was sorely regretting not learning the name of. She had spent the day theory crafting an outfit, something that she was adept at, even if she mostly defaulted to the custom fitted, exceptionally protective suit that she had spent an eyewatering amount on.

However, for whatever reason, she had blanked all day. In the end, she went with a decent dress. Nothing revealing or formal, but a nice blue dress made to fit a large variety of social situations. One she hadn't worn due to the total lack of any social situations that she attended on her own time.

She had done a full face of makeup, unlike the minor amounts she used on a day to day. It certainly wasn't gaudy, but it was just a little bit more—adding little to what she normally wore, but enough to differentiate it by look. She wore her long dark hair in a similar bun as she always did, though just a little looser than normal, less manufactured and corporate.

She realised that she had completely over-engineered her current outfit, for what it was, but she could hardly care at the moment. She had much more important things to worry about.

Communication.

Something vital to any good conversation was the method of communication. Some worked better in certain situations, like texting was when trying to keep things quiet, but most of the time, the method of choice was to simply speak. Problem being, Tracker could barely decipher Australian Sign Language.

She had a friend long ago that had taught her a fair amount, enough to have a basic conversation at the time, but now years had passed, and she had forgotten much of the language. It was a good thing that Tracker was exceptional at learning. Memorisation was something that she needed to get a grip on in her earlier days; locations, movement patterns, who was who and where was where. All of this information needed to be learnt at the drop of a hat in a dire situation.

In rare situations, that also had applied to languages. She had learnt the basics of a handful of languages, focussing more on their radio chatter, and other communication that could be intercepted. But she had managed to learn a language to nigh fluency within a week once, a task she had thoroughly impressed herself, and her contractor by. She had been paid handsomely for that job.

However, today she was accomplishing something she never had before. Today, she had learnt ASL as quickly as she could, her mind whirring with an anxiety unlike anything she had experienced, at least not for years. It was one-part impressive and one-part mortifying; the anxiety of the near future pushing her mind so much harder than a life-or-death situation had in years.

Now, as she finally pried herself from the screen that was streaming comprehensive ASL lessons on four times speed, she rushed herself out the door and into the elevator before she could stop herself.

There hadn't been a set place to meet, mostly because it was inherently obvious. The man was literally granted the name Chef, and anyone who knew him, called him by Chef—oblivious of his real name. Tracker made her way to the cafeteria, which had very few people sitting within its numerous tables and chairs. None of which lifted their head to look in her direction.

Tracker moved with a grace that she didn't feel towards the doors of the kitchen and gently made her way through them, careful to not make much noise, lest someone take precise notice of her.

She slipped inside to find the kitchen empty and dark, but she had read up on the building plans weeks ago and knew that just through a connecting door was a corridor that eventually led to two living quarters. She stepped on through that door and found herself enchanted by the smell of cooking, a specific smell that reminded her of warm moments from a household she had left long ago.

She had always laughed at the cartoons where a character smelt something nice and floated on over to where it was, but now she was almost embarrassed to find herself standing in an open doorway into Chef's living quarters—the sudden displacement from where she stood was almost jarring. She found the tall and fine man standing over a stove, stirring a pot or two with a loving focus. He turned to her and gave her a wide smile, flashing two rows of almost perfect teeth—something Tracker couldn't help but prefer to the overly white and aligned teeth of almost every American celebrity.

He was clad in more casual clothing than the strict and maintained work uniform he had been in when they first met. He wore a pair of jeans, not quite skin-tight, but enough that it accentuated the length of his legs. His shirt was a nice dress shirt; a slightly darker blue than his bright eyes—covered over by a generous apron to protect his clothes against the occasional sputter out of the pots. He was just as gorgeous as Tracker remembered him to be, almost intimidatingly so, and it made a small part of her even more anxious now that she was here in his presence.

The man gestured over to a simple table, not large by any means, but more than enough to house four or so guests. Two places were set semi-formally with nice cutlery, placemats and small bowls and plates.

Tracker took a moment to look around the man's living space and found it to be surprisingly nice. Though it wasn't on the same level of luxury that she and the rest of the team enjoyed on floor eight, this was easily one of the better accommodations you could find yourself in within the building. It had excellent and expansive kitchen, filled with pans and tools of all sorts for obvious reasons, including a separate area of a bedroom and a bathroom.

It wasn't long before the man was finished cooking, and even less time until a large array of food was laid in front of her—letting her feast with her eyes. A larger bowl of what looked and smelt to be chicken tikka masala, the lovely red-brown hue of it's gravy leaving Tracker's mouth salivating. There were various other small dishes, including a smaller serving of tadka daal; a mild and warm dish she had loved cooking with her mother during her youth.

She realised that she had been staring at the array of food for more time than was polite, and she forced her eyes up to the chef himself, staring at her with a gentle smile on his face—clearly enjoying her expression of rapture.

"You made all this?" Tracker said aloud and equally as dumbly. Chef raised an eyebrow amusedly, before pulling up a small tablet with an electronic pen. Tracker almost smacked herself over the head. She had been planning to greet him smoothly with sign, but her dumb mouth just couldn't stop itself. She quickly caught the man's attention and begun to sign rapidly and accurately.

"Thank you for the meal, though I hate to think how long it took you to just feed me." She said, the awkwardness of her mind having to translate from the raw signed words into more comprehendible English was now gone, letting her communicate almost as fluently in ASL as she could speak English. Chef jolted a little, before he placed down his tablet and grinned boyishly.

"You're a fast study it seems." He stated, his elegant fingers moving quickly with the words. He was still signing slower than he had with the other man she had briefly met in the kitchen, but it was faster than she would have been able to read only the day before.

"A skill that comes into use often." Tracker replied sagely, finding herself easing back into the groove of not being wonderstruck by the gorgeous man in front of her. He spent a few moments organising the plates on the table, and giving her one, as well as pouring her a glass of water, then commencing their feast.

They didn't speak while they ate, for obvious reasons, but Tracker found herself unable to even if she desperately wanted to. The food was so reminiscent of the food that she had once cooked with family and extended family as a child—the lovely moments of cooking with her mother and her aunt, on the occasion that she visited from India. She didn't quite realise that she had abandoned the cutlery and instead begun to eat with her hands, like she had all throughout her childhood, the chapati comfortably holding the rice, vegetables and a decent helping of the main dish.

The time flew by as they both ate, enjoying their company and mutual enjoyment of the food at hand, but before long the food was all gone—somehow just enough to fill but also leave a small, unfulfilled space, leaving you wanting more.

"You enjoyed my cooking, I hope?" Tracker took a deep breath, feeling the light burn from the spice in the food. She looked at the man in front of her deeply, the slight smile on his androgenous features along with the faint wafts of his black hair that had come loose from his tightly controlled and artistically created bun. She swallowed the last of her class of water and cleaned her hands before she signed back at the man.

"I'd swear that you learnt to cook from my grandmother. Are you sure you haven't met her?" She saw the grin sprout on his face, along with a rare pang of an untainted emotion within Tracker's own chest. She almost felt ashamed as she admitted to herself that it was joy.

"I wish I could travel to India. I believe that I could learn much about the food there but being Linked there is very unsafe." The man shrugged sadly, and Tracker understood. She'd only been to India twice while she was young, mostly at the behest of her maternal grandfather's funeral and shortly after her grandmother's, but it was already dangerous to be there then. Now, it was a constant warzone, Linked clashing against one another with practically nothing that can be done to stop them—leading those without a link to call their own with no choice but to run and hide.

They chatted idly for a few moments longer before they eventually arrived at the topic of Mirah. Strangely enough, all of the responses she received made sense. The man had an empathic link, to an extent. He was capable of feeling the general emotions of someone, though usually it was muddy, and was also capable of random flashes of inspiration or understanding—allowing him to almost embody the mindset and memories of someone else for just a moment.

It was one of the links that, if you changed it only minorly, would easily allow someone to be incredibly powerful. The ability to assume someone's mindset so completely that you could recount memories that they'd had, emotions they'd experienced, and things important to them? It was a spy's wet dream.

Though, Tracker found herself relieved that a man like Chef was the one to find himself with that link, as obscure as it's use was in such a volatile form and as clearly undefined as it was categorised. Instead of being someone who lies and cheats to rise through the ladder, he used it to isolate foods distinctly tied to emotions to help people. To help her.

To help her. A perfectly cooked Indian dinner, almost exactly how her mother would have cooked it herself, in just the way that she liked it. Tracker gave into the warm emotion that realisation left in her chest, allowing herself to feel the warmth that she so often had to manufacture for the sake of appearances. Conversing came easily after that, looser than Tracker had allowed herself to be with anyone in forever; exhilarating in the sheer connection that she could feel between them.

There was something between them, as Tracker and Chef talked about nothing more important than their favourite meals and the pastimes they enjoy. It was undeniably rapturous, the claws of the beast sinking deep into her flesh and dragging her closer towards him, despite her trained mind screaming at her to not let it happen. Her mind knew that it was a fool's wish, something she had seen go horribly for any number of ex-co-workers.

Finding love, that is.

Tracker almost jolted out of her chair when that thought hit her mind, startling the beautiful man opposite her. Her stomach dropped with the leap out of her chair, the beautiful emotions she was feeling surrendering to the pull of the void in her gut. She had half a mind to grab them and hold them close, but the anxiety paralysed her as she watched them disappear, subsumed almost entirely—nothing but anxiety left behind to fester.

"Are you alright?" He asked gently, making sure that she saw every movement. Tracker nodded shakily, but now the warm trance she had found herself in was gone—leaving her with a heart beating at a million miles per hour, the adrenalin kicking in only moments later, making her feel ill.

"I'm fine, I just…" She paused, unsure what to sign next, but she saw the flash of understanding in the man's eyes. Tracker couldn't be sure if he had received a moment of her mindset from his link, or if he was just good at reading the room in general.

"I understand." He said, his gentle hand gestures somehow translating into a calm and soothing voice in her mind. Tracker swallowed against a shock of sickness from her stomach and promptly signed goodbye, before practically running from the room.

When she finally made it back to her own room, she didn't even bother to change clothes before she launched herself, face first, into her bedsheets. She wrapped herself in them and sat there silently for a few hours, contemplating everything as tears somehow made their way to her long since tearless eyes.

"Well," she said softly to no-one, "at least I got the answers I wanted."

No, she didn't, she realised. She didn't even get his name.


A/N: A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 32: Fat Rich

The Training Room was blisteringly hot, like it had been for weeks now. At least when Walter was inside of its metal containment walls.

Willem had told Walter that training his link was going to be difficult, and an act of sheer will in many cases, but something part of Walter had chosen to ignore the mans words—no matter how truthful he knew they were.

That was clearly a mistake.

Walter's training was gruelling, consisting of days upon days of the same action, over and over. He would begin with his pillar of flame, and slowly work it down to a smaller and smaller size over the course of the day.

It didn't seem like a difficult concept and Walter had even been so fanciful as to believe that he could control it in record time. But no, he couldn't. It wasn't for lack of willpower or concentration, but just time and adjustment.

Walter's link, at least the fire element, wanted to be on full-bore all the time. It was almost an emotion that the element itself held, a materialisation of what it embodied. The fire wanted to roar with as much power as it could, burning away anything and everything that it could with abandon. And with the seemingly unlimited power that Walter had access to, being an infinite type link, it had all the fuel in the world to do just that.

It was something that Walter could swear would pair better with a power usage type that exemplified being able to dole out the amount of power you could give to the element at any one time. But Walter's link, for whatever reason, had infinite access to the energy from beyond.

That didn't make it any less brutal to train, though. With no real control over how much power the element had access to, Walter was left to learn to control it in other ways. Walter had chosen a sort of pseudo meditation to do the trick, sitting there and slowly enforcing his will over the unrestrained flame.

It was a slow but sure process, the benefits extremely visible and obvious to the naked eye. In fact, it struck at a very specific part of Walter's brain, giving the intense and monotonous training a very game-like feel. How many times had he done tasks just as grindy or repetitive as this in a game?

Walter had played games his entire life, and if he was allowed to toot his own horn, he was pretty fucking good at them. Of course, it was an escape from the world that surrounded him. A school that he excelled in, but had no friends to enjoy his success with, a homelife that was amazing until a 'client' walked through the doors and made the room freeze in paralysing fear.

So, Walter had retreated into games, just ones on the computer at first, games that were free and competitive, that made him feel like he was truly besting someone or something. It stoked a fire inside Walter, a competitive spirit that he'd never been able to find in his academics or in the sports he had tried as a child.

He had become exceptional at games, not the best of course, but among them. He had faint dreams of going pro one day, making his way to Korea or Europe to really compete with the best that the world had to offer in the games he played. Russia was the end goal of every aspiring pro in the world, being the conglomeration of the smartest and most skilled players on the planet. It was even a nice place to live; stable politically, one of the wealthiest countries in the world—better yet, it was far, far away from Righteous Order and all the other gangs who had his family under their thumb.

The fire in Walter's hands sputtered out, flickering inconsistently before it disappeared altogether. Walter would have been frustrated, if he weren't so focused on his training. There was no time for frustration, it was something that'd only slow him down in progressing to where he could actually do something with his link.

Once again, he summoned the fire in his palm, the element coming out of wherever it sat with barely any protesting. It had been a little difficult to do so at first, maybe just a part of Walter's own nervousness about his link, but now it was almost second nature. The pillar of fire formed quickly, shooting upwards towards the tall ceiling with a greedy flame.

Walter didn't let it grow to its full height, quietly hampering the fire's enthusiasm and simmering it down to less than the height of a tall person, shorter than Ajax too. It was easy enough to get it to this state, and if Walter were really focusing when he summoned the flame, he could stop it from being bigger in the first place.

With Walter enacting his will on the flame, it slowly lessened in size over time. There were diminishing returns of course, the flame requiring more and more of the right willpower to lessen it as it grew smaller. The right kind of willpower had to be added too, it couldn't be an overpowering iron-grip willpower, it had to be calm and quieting. The sort of willpower that came from doing something for so many hours that it becomes second nature to do it. A willpower that forms without you realising it has.

Something Walter has tried very hard at manufacturing. It worked, to an extent, but what really leant itself to success is actually doing it, over and over. Something that Walter was even better at.

Walter was good at the grind. He was excellent at setting his brain on something and doing it. He had done it with his academics when he was younger, when he had once wanted to be just like his mum and dad. He had set himself up for life when he'd done that, able to coast his way through almost any test someone could throw at him. After high school he had wondered what he should do with his life, especially after he'd found himself with a link. But he just fell short of truly wanting anything.

Now, though, he had been given that chance. He had been excited when he first arrived here, and he secretly wanted to start training his link right away but was met with the wall of physical fitness and other little physical training. Walter had persevered, mostly because he was waiting for the time when he could really sink his teeth into training his link.

It was like when you started up a new game with a friend who already played and while you slogged your way through the boring main quest and levelling process, they would swear up and down that it got better in the endgame. Walter had to promise that to himself while he ran, creating another little voice in his head that said as much.

Now though? It was worth it. This training, as boring as it was, is exactly what Walter wanted to do with his time. He let it eat up every moment of his day that he could surrender to it. For weeks, he had almost exclusively dominated the Training Room in his team's little private gym, and now it was starting to show.

Today, Walter knew that he was going to hit a milestone. He could feel it in his bones.

The flame, the same one that had been just shy of Ajax's height, was now only as tall as his hand if place upright. The flame, instead of the wild and unpredictable thing that he had been desperately taming for weeks, was now almost smooth in appearance. If someone took a single glance at the flame in his hands, they might even think that it was a solid object, if it weren't for the heat and light coming from it.

The smooth consistency of the flame was paramount now, Walter's willpower was honed with a precision that he'd only experienced in the most difficult matches he'd ever player in his life—against true professional players. Now, the flame grew smaller and smaller, lessening my a little bit every few seconds and wavering slightly before settling underneath Walter's careful and watchful gaze.

He was taming the flame. It was a wild and rambunctious being by nature, a literal embodiment of the element itself. He couldn't remember his Awakening dream, a stipulation in the contract that he had signed within it, but he could remember the impression that it had given him. He knew that he had met the embodiment of the elements within his dream, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. It had been a surprisingly pleasant experience—but now the flame in his hand gave him a distinct déjà vu as it writhed almost playfully underneath his mind's power.

Walter almost grinned in response to the hidden memory, the feeling of an infectiously exuberant aura flooding into his mind. The flame grew smaller still, now only capable of filling Walter's palm despite its struggling. This was the furthest that Walter had ever gotten in his training, and it felt like the last one-hundred metre stretch after running a marathon—simultaneously filled with drive to finish and drained to the bone.

There was no warning when it happened, no moment of exaltation or even so much as a moment of clarity. When it happened, it simply was.

Within Walter's hand sat a small and docile flame, barely bigger than what would sit atop a candle's wick. He quickly realised that it wasn't taking any mental power for it to stay that way, the flame was complying with him almost completely.

Tentatively, the man prompted the flame to grow in size and it complied easily. Within a blink, the flame was as tall as Walter's own arm, burning brightly and gleefully. But, instead of taking the rope he had given it and pulling, it stayed in that exact form, happily flickering away with an inherent cheer.

Walter allowed it to grow and shrink a few times, not quite believing that the same fire that he'd struggled with so fiercely was now happy to go along with his whim. It would even increase and decrease in its heat if he asked it to, though that did require more coaxing than just changing its size.

In fact, the flame was so malleable that Walter could even make it bend, however that was supposed to be possible. Though, Walter had well and truly suspended his disbelief once he could sprout pillars of fire from his hand.

With a few hours left in the day for training, Walter spent it on trying to figure out what the new limitations were for the fire he could wield. For one, it seems that Walter could control two at once, one in both hand. The flame was more difficult to control and separating them in his mind was even more difficult. If he commanded one to grow, more often than not the other would as well. So, for the moment, it was more of a duplication of one fire node than two individuals.

But, even as Walter really tried to push on further, excited by the new advancement in his link, he was stopped by just how tired he was. Walter was notoriously terribly at keeping track of time, but the entire process to subjugate the fire would have probably taken him five hours, even if it had only felt like thirty minutes.

Regretfully, Walter dragged himself away from the shiny new toy and called out the command to leave the Training Room. There was no-one in the private training area, the lights still on and just as bright as during the day, but there was a slight darkness that lingered in the room that was distinctive of being night—even in the Underground.

Walter walked out of the private area, finding himself amongst the rows and rows of machines surrounded by the track that Walter had run over and over to gain some fitness. Walter had neglected the physical fitness aspect of his training for the most part, only really doing the work when Willem told him to.

Walter walked through the rows, silently making his way towards the corridors that eventually lead to the elevator. There was almost no-one out here this late, most of the crowd that get in early also go to sleep a little earlier, leaving the thick of the night to those who are really pushing themselves.

The few that Walter could spot were all a fair amount older than he, and probably more senior in the training programme. Most of them were using weights to train, probably just the result of superhuman strength being the most common link by a longshot.

One man, so heavily muscled that he would put a bodybuilder to absolute shame, lifted a bar that carried hundreds of kilograms with one arm, curling it without any perceivable strain. A woman, not that much older than himself and a little shorter sat underneath an apparatus that probably had something to do with the weights resting on her shoulders as she squatted with difficulty. She wore skimpy exercise clothes, giving full view of her abdominals clenching with the effort.

Though, her sleek figure quickly changed into a wall of muscle, each centimetre of her skin was covered with a bulging muscle, so extremely defined that it almost looked alien. Walter, so consumed by the odd sight, didn't even notice the massive man as his own body was subsumed by the man's mass.

Walter bounced back off of the man's stomach like you would off of a trampoline. He only barely managed to keep his footing steady as he tried to regain his composure with the sudden interruption.

"Oh, shit man. I'm sorry, I–" Walter began, but a deep, resonant chuckle halted the flurry of words that were appearing in Walter's mind.

"It's no big, man. I take up a lot of space." Walter looked up at the man who, while tall, wasn't quite as tall as Ajax. What he lacked for in height, he made up for in girth, however. The man was, frankly, the largest man he'd ever seen—there was no contest. He hadn't even seen a caricature of a person as overweight as this. The large man, the fat on his face so pronounced that it almost covered his eyes, even though he was smiling happily.

"Oh, wait!" The large man's eyes lit up with recognition, "You're one of the new kids that ended up on floor eight, right? The one that Baxter has an issue with." Walter froze a little but nodded hesitantly. The man seemed to realise that Walter might be coming to less that stellar conclusions and waved it away with a meaty arm—the man's clothing so amazingly oversized that it hung off of him in strange places, yet barely constrained his bulk in others.

"Ah no, I couldn't give a rat's ass what happens to Baxter. I hope you find some way out of that mess; truth be told. It's a hairy situation to be in." The oversized man grinned jovially, "But you guys have been the talk of the town. Floor eight, like, never gets used, y'know? And for a team of undefined? You're a collection of 'we've never seen that before'." Walter didn't know how to take that. As praise? In the end he settled on a wry grin.

"Yeah, well. The amenities are nice, for sure." The fat man scoffed, his bulk shifting easily with he action.

"I'd bet. We haven't learned much about you all, truth be told. As much as everyone blusters about putting the undefineds in their place, or even those who wanna get to know ya, they all seem to come up dry. I know that Dean talked to one of yours, though he's a bit of a weasel and won't give out info so easy."

"Why…" Walter's face twitched with disbelief, "Why are we such a big deal right now? It's not like we're all that special, man." The man snorted derisively, the sound loud enough to echo in the massive underground gymnasium.

"Come on, mate. You guys are the mystery of the year; undefineds, lots of sponsor money, floor eight. Not to mention just one of your guys took apart Baxter's crew in, like, thirty seconds. If you're all as strong as that guy?" He whistled lengthily, admiring the image in his mind.

"Ah, not all of us are as strong as Ajax. I don't think I am, anyways." A slight bitterness came to mind with Ajax. It had been weeks and Walter still hadn't talked with him after that talk at the cafeteria table. He could understand the response that his little reveal had garnered from the man, but he was still a little hurt by it nonetheless. If Walter was good at anything, it was letting little wounds sit and fester until they were gaping holes.

"Oh, not strong, are you? That why you're training, like, three times what you're teammates are putting in?" Walter nodded easily.

"Had to try get control of the fire I can summon. I can control, elements and stuff, by the way." The man's face stretched out in surprise so much that his eyes were clearly visible, the brown sclera filled with interest.

"You're telling me that you're a magic type link?" Walter, familiar with the term, nodded shyly, "God man, that's fuckin' awesome! I never thought I'd meet someone with one in my lifetime. Show me what you can do!" The large man said excitably, but Walter recoiled a little bit.

"I dunno, I just got a handle on it. I don't want to catch you with a blast of fire to your face, or anything." The man actually laughed this time, his giant belly shifting too and fro as he did so.

"Trust me, you don't need to worry about that." With a wink from the man, Walter felt strangely reassured. There was something about the nigh-absolute confidence that the man spoke that hit him as genuine confidence, rather than bluster.

Walter held out a hand and quickly created a small flame, pointing as far away from the other man as he could, just in case. The small candleflame appeared easily, and just as the large man went to comment on it, the flame shot up a few metres in size, gleefully lapping at the air, looking for something to burn with its heat.

"Wow, that's… pretty damn impressive man. And you can do this forever?" The man asked idly as he stared at the flame with a wonderous expression. Walter laughed with a little embarrassment colouring his cheeks.

"Yeah. I had to control it down from being a massive pillar of fire all the time." The man nodded, eyes attached to the dancing flame. However, before Walter could react, the man reached out and placed his hand within the burning fire, and Walter could feel the flame quickly acting to eat away at the man's flesh.

"What the fuck, man!" Walter squawked as he retracted the fire immediately, but when he looked back to the man, and looked more closely at his hand, he found it unmarred. In fact, the massive man had noticeably lessened in size, not my much, bur enough to be noticeable.

"Ah, sorry mate. I don't always think before I do shit like that," He placed his hand on display closer to Walter's face, the skin entirely untouched, "I can sacrifice stored fat for damage I take, so It woulda taken quite a fair bit more damage than that to really do me dirty." He grinned widely, the slight lessening of fat on his face making it obvious that the man was probably handsome underneath it all.

"G'day, I'm Richard, or just Fat Rich. You?" He greeted as he placed the miraculously unburned hand between the two of them. After a long moment, Walter grabbed the hand tentatively and shook it.

"Walter, or just Walt, I guess."


A/N: A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; Thomas H., TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 33: Unwanted Changes

Rich, or Fat Rich, was Walter's gateway into a whole new world of Linked. In fact, he didn't realise just how disconnected his team had been from the rest of the training facility. He had just assumed that every group was just as isolated as his own, and it had taken just shy of six weeks for him to figure that out.

Rich was, at the heart of it all, a great man. Kind, hilarious, and a great friend. Attentive to boot. Rich was about as interested in games as Ajax was, and declined to give them a go, but he was into comics almost as much as Walter was.

They spent much of their time talking and training, chatting about the new issues and line-ups of seasons of comic books adaptions. It was a different experience than chatting with Ajax, who was so guarded about himself, and the others in his team were the same. Mirah barely talked at all in general conversation, and Aaliyah was almost hostile when he'd asked her questions.

In fact, Walter found himself drifting from the group entirely. Aside for Tracker's lessons over the past weeks, they had barely been in direct contact with each other—their only significant interactions being around the cafeteria table, eating lunch.

So it was odd when Willem had ordered them all down to the Underground, like he had on their first few days in the training facility. Now, the walk down there could be done with eyes closed, the muscle memory almost as instinctual as any other basic task.

The team walked alongside each other, silently making their way out of the elevator and towards their designated training area. Walter distinctly noticed that Mirah and Ajax were standing closer together than they had weeks prior. Not romantically, mind you, but with a sense of camaraderie or closeness that Walter wasn't sure he'd ever managed to form with the Greek giant.

With a small pang of envy in Walter's chest, they moved quickly into the Gym, the wide-open space filled with people due to the time of day. But immediately, Walter realised something was off. In fact, the entire team were suddenly on edge, a strange dread making its way into their stomachs. They moved through the rows of equipment slowly, eyes scanning the room.

"What's going on?" Ajax whispered subtly as the team squished together to move past a particularly large apparatus.

"No clue, but people are giving us looks." Aaliyah said in a normal voice, at just the right volume to almost be lost in the cacophony of sounds that was almost inherent to the Gym's environment. No-one dared to speak after that, only keeping their eyes searching the surroundings as they passed through.

Aaliyah was right, Walter could see people giving them quick looks and then turning away in short order. Some whispers cropped up when they passed, though that could be a trick of the mind. Walter couldn't convince himself that it wasn't however.

It was as they drew close to the door of their private training area that Walter spied Rich out of the corner of his eyes. Their eyes connected for a moment, and Rich moved towards them as casually as he could. The rest of the group, oblivious to his new found friend, were immediately wary of the man before Walter waved at them with his hand.

"Rich, do you know what's–" Walter started, but was interrupted by a pained expression on Rich's face.

"Man, I'm so sorry. I didn't know that they were going to pull this shit on you. Everyone's only learning about it now, man. You need to stay strong out there, don't let them break you." Rich didn't stick around to be asked questions, passing by without so much as a farewell. For some reason, seeing the normally unflappable man so perturbed was almost harrowing for Walter. It'd be like if he saw Ajax with an expression of malice on his face.

"Uh, so, that's a really bad sign." Walter said slowly, turning back to his group. The rest of the group were various shades of shocked, with Ajax clenching his powerful jaw and his eyebrows furrowed, Aaliyah with her eyes shut in consternation, and Mirah looking as she always did, but with more nuance.

"A friend of yours?" Aaliyah said dryly, and Walter simply nodded as they began their walk towards the training area they all spent much of their time in. As soon as they walked through the doors, they were greeted with the sight of a stoic Willem, arms crossed over his chest, next to a taller, smartly dressed man. Off in the corner, you could see Tracker as she was on the phone, facing the wall away from the two men.

"–I simply think this will be an excellent chance for our students to compete against each other in as close to real combat as we can get." Willem just nodded; his expression almost entirely neutral.

"And you want to move up the real combat training of my own team to match yours, who have been here for almost twice as long?" Willem's tone wasn't scathing, but it was cold. Someone unfamiliar with the man might think that this was indifference, but it was actually a cold contempt—something Aaliyah had pieced together from being around the man so often for her meditation training.

"Hello? How can I help you?" Ajax said affably as he walked closer to the unfamiliar man. He was suited in a perfectly tailored, pinstriped suit that starkly contrasted the pale of his skin and matched the raven black, oiled hair on top of his head.

"Ah, welcome Willem's team. We were just discussing the minutia of our two teams participating in a combat exercise." The smiling man immediately gave off an aura that meshed terribly with every person in Walter's team. Mirah almost recoiled from just how predatory the man's expression was, even if it pretended to be amiable. Aaliyah, in a rare moment of almost-comradery, pulled the other girl behind her own form subtly, hiding Mirah's tense form behind her own taller one.

Walter, for his part, had a pit form in his stomach and felt as his organs dropped into the sudden fracture in space. He had been wary and suspicious before, but this was downright mortifying. Baxter had come after them. He was forcing Willem's hand and making them face off in combat.

The man in the pinstripe suit let the personable smile on his face grow a little sharper as he surveyed the reactions of his audience.

"Well, there's nothing more to it! We'll be holding the match in the arenas in only a few hours. An exciting time for any new trainee!" Then he left, the smell of his overpowering cologne lingering in the air for just a moment after he waltzed out of the room, almost like a lingering threat against them.

"You've now had the pleasure of meeting Cain." No-one recognised the name, but it was quickly entered into the mind of everyone present. "We're trying to get this stopped, but Tracker isn't having any luck getting through to her superiors and I can't do shit. This is all AASAU ruling on a technicality that allows them to progress a trainee's training if they think they're advanced enough." Walter could swear that the short and stocky trainer was about to spit in disgust, but he thought better of it and just sighed.

"Wait, so we're fighting against Baxter's team now?" Ajax said, blinking quickly as if he were fighting against a bright light.

"Individually, yes." Willem's jaw clenched, showing an impressive amount of muscle definition even in such an obscure place, "Usually you start proper combat training a week or two from now, and graduate to the Arena a few weeks of training after that. Now, you're going in with basically no training against one of the most senior teams."

"They're smurfing." Walter blurted out without thinking, making the rest of the team put away their worry and look at him questioningly. "I–I mean, smurfing just means they're fighting the weak fighters to make themselves feel good. Like if Michael Tyson went back into amateur boxing at his peak for fun." Aaliyah snorted out a laugh, though not one filled with derision like usual. It was a genuine laugh.

"In simple terms, yes. In more accurate terms, they're going to try to fuck you up." The sudden rapture that Willem caused by simply using a swear word was almost glorious. For some reason, the dissonance that it caused within the team members drove it home for them. Walter gulped, but Mirah managed to speak first.

"How much?" Her voice was consistent and calm, though her hands were clenched within the pockets of her gym sweats—even if no-one noticed the white knuckles.

"As much as they can get through with me as a judge and referee." Willem said, his tone low and dangerous. "They can't stop me, it's in my literal job description and I could make AASAU's pay heftily for it. So, here's how it's going to go." Willem paused for a moment, leaving only the sound of Tracker talking in hushed tones over her cell phone.

"You have no experience, you all have no idea how to fight. You are going to be fighting against trainees that have had at least a month of intense combat training, probably more. They are going to be better than you at fighting, period. The likelihood that any one of you will win in a fight is infinitesimal." The small man, despite his stature, was large and imposing in that moment. An authoritative figure that he neglected to be most of the time, content to let the trainees become better in their own ways.

"You need to be careful and self-protective. They will try to get things through me, even if it'll be almost impossible. They will cheat to hurt you and their own referee will pull every trick in the book to keep the match going. You cannot go for deathblows, there is no win condition for deathblows, and that's the only way some of you will be able to win, Walter specifically."

"Your only concern is running out the clock and waiting for the moment that you can call surrender." Willem's eyes were like little gems in his head, glimmering with an iron command that they hadn't truly experienced from the man until now. "Am I understood?"

The team hastily nodded, not willing to tell the man otherwise. In a way, it was comforting to have the man who had been training the team so firmly on their side, though they had no doubt that he'd administer his judgement equally amongst the match's participants.

Walter's heart was starting to furiously beat in his chest, his mouth going suddenly dry from the rush of adrenalin as his mind began to scratch the surface of just how serious this was.

"Holy shit, guys." He said shakily as he turned to his teammates, "What the fuck do we do?" Walter's eyes met with Ajax's first, who was surprisingly calm about it all, and then Mirah next, who had nothing if not an excellent poker face. Aaliyah's face was more telling, filled with a quiet resignation.

"Do we have much of a choice? Willem wasn't exactly offering us any options, and if Tracker is over there," Aaliyah pointed towards the suited lady with her thumb, "trying to figure this out and hasn't already, then there isn't going to be anything we can do to stop it. We're sitting duck, Walt."

Walter gulped again against his dry throat, the pet name that Walter had slowly grown to adopt as a second name didn't work to ease his anxiety. His rebellious hands began to shake, even as he tried to hide them beneath the sleeves of his jumper. His breathing started to become laboured as the world began to close in around him, an indistinct and fuzzy wall blocking off his vision.

It was when he felt a cool hand on the tips of his fingers that it jolted him enough to push the fuzzy feeling away, revealing Mirah's classically blank face. He was almost in shock, never having been as close to the woman as right now, giving him an excellent look at the scar running down her cheek and through her lips that he found his eyes always resting on. They locked eyes for a moment, the stark green of Mirah's and the mundane brown of Walter's intermingling as their gazes formed a connection and transferred a silent message.

You're with us. I'm with you.

It was such a simple thing, barely more than a sentiment, but somehow it calmed the shaking to jitters, and the fuzzy feeling to a slight light-headedness. Walter managed to take a deep breath as he nodded thankfully towards the scarred girl, not quite brave enough to speak right now. After a long string of breaths, Walter managed to regain control over his body again, the shakes now an afterthought.

"Okay. Alright," he said to himself, self soothing the remaining worry before sighing deeply, "Ajax." He said as strongly as he could, which might not be impressively loud, but it had a conviction that he'd built over years of working with teams. The tall man regarded Walter seriously, their eyes truly meeting for the first time since Ajax had said something stupid and made Walter mad. All of that was thrown away in lieu of the dire situation. Ajax nodded, signifying his attention.

"You're the only one who had actually fought against their guys. I want you to tell me everything you can about the other team; links, possible weaknesses, personalities, everything, and we'll talk strategy." He looked commandingly over his other teammates, searching their faces for their attention, and finding it in droves. "Then we'll find out how we will make it through this alive."


A/N: A massive thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! And a gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron Marisa E.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 34: Domain

Guy Baker had never been a confident man. He had always felt younger, weaker, and lesser than even peers of his own age. He couldn't quite put a pin in the exact moment that his perception of himself had become that way, but it had done nothing but increase as he went through life.

Maybe it was because he always felt out of place in the nice, inner-city suburbs that he grew up in. Maybe it was the lack of a father figure, or the handful of times that his mother had introduced a new boyfriend, only for them to break up a few years later, if they were lucky. Or it could just be that he had always stood out.

Now, though, he stood like a sore thumb, his presence in the private little room off the side of the Gym was so stark from those around him that it legitimately hurt to be in the same room.

"Are we really doing this Bax?" Lawrence said, adjusting the beanie on his head nervously. Lawrence, usually called Slip, was the only person brave enough to call Jeremy Baxter by any shortened name. Guy suspected that Jeremy only really kept Slip around for the novelty of it.

"Of course we are." Jeremy replied even as his fingers tapped away methodically at his phone's screen. It was the latest and greatest linktech phone, probably specifically augmented by Techtron too. Guy had never really gotten his hands on linktech, his mother only being so wealthy, but Jeremy's every device or personal item had some sort of linktech component to it. The man's suit was weaved with linktech fibres, for crying out loud.

"Won't it, y'know, make us look weak? For beating on a bunch of freshies?" Slip said tentatively and Jeremy lifted his head from his phone for a moment, his blue eyes giving a very distinct unimpressed glare.

"If you really think I'm doing something that would harm my reputation, you're a fool." His voice was cold and hard, the voice he most often used when he wasn't showboating to others outside his inner circle, if Guy could even be considered anything more than a lap dog.

"Really?" Slip said dumbly, "What'll this do for our rep, boss?" Guy would have loved to scoff at the other boy, but Slip was the only decent person in the group, and even if he was acting dumb at the moment, messing with his act was a good way to lose the only person that would offer Guy any support.

"Fear, idiot." Jeremy insulted, though it lacked heat, somehow making it even more intimidating. "We are amongst the next generation of Linked, the people who we'll be dealing with, paying off, fighting and allying with. If we set it straight right now that we are willing to cross lines to hurt someone, and we won't be punished?" Jeremy didn't finish the thought, letting the rest of the room infer what he was getting at.

Guy let his gaze wash over the room's inhabitants, though only briefly. Jeremy was fully decked out within his training and combat suit, the black, skin-tight 'second skin' only accentuated the wiry muscle the tall man possessed, the deep black of it contrasting against his pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes starkly. He had received the full suit a few weeks prior, before they'd been briefed on Jeremy's plans to rough up the undefined team that everyone was talking about. The suit was protective, sure, but it was actually more about accentuating movements and power, a thin layer of extremely potent muscle covering the body, reinforcing almost every movement.

The black surface of the suit shone with a faint reflection of the lights, giving it an almost metallic look, along with it's intentionally futuristic aesthetics. Guy had looked online for any mention of the suits, curious about the tech behind it, and found a few listings from Techtron that gave a product description, but the price was ladled as 'Please contact seller.' In other words, 'Too expensive for you.'

Slip was standing a few metres away from Jeremy, being as close to his right-hand man as you could be without being an indentured slave. Slip was outfitted with a general protective body armour with limited linktech integration, just being the scraps that Jeremy had thrown him at a whim. Over top of the armour he wore his gold and silver hoodie with the brand name beanie sitting over top of his long, messy, brown hair. Slip was a better person than Guy's other two teammates, though he wasn't sure by how much. At least he wasn't a massive douchebag like Jeremy.

The last person standing in the room, silently meditating on a nearby mat, was Terry Nguyen. He was slightly taller than Guy was, standing at five seven, but his musculature made him seem far bigger. Terry was physically elite, and exceptional in almost every way, even intellectually. Smart, powerful, and useful, which is probably why Ernest Baxter had the boy accompany Jeremy as a bodyguard and attack dog.

The man, even while just meditating, cut an intimidating figure—giving every impression that he was ready to jump into battle at any given moment. The Asian man, probably Vietnamese, was thankfully pretty neutral when it came to Guy, even if Jeremy was vocal in his distaste for the boy. Terry wore another skin-tight suit, though it currently hung around his waist, allowing Guy to see the intense amount of muscle the other man had. He didn't even have a link that benefitted from physical training.

Then, that left Guy himself. Short at a middle-of-the-road five six, pudgy despite linked burning calories like nothing else. His short and curly hair and baby blue eyes only made him look weaker and frumpy in comparison to even the comically dressed Slip. He had always wondered where his features had come from, definitely not coming from his mother, and with her adamant refusal to tell him who his father was, he'd been left without that personal understanding in his life.

Now that he'd found it, he'd almost do anything to wind back the clock and avoid it at all costs.

Jeremy's phone buzzed briefly, and the tall boy turned to put it in a secure locker within the concrete wall he was leaning on, turning to the rest of his team with a look of malice slowly dawning on his too-handsome face.

"Alright idiots, it's showtime in fifteen." The room quickly turned their attention to him, Terrence lifting himself from the mat and walking to join the circle they formed before combat. Terry took the direct opposite position from Jeremy, Slip taking the right, leaving only Guy to take the left-hand spot.

Guy walked over from his little hiding spot tentatively, kicking himself for looking even more like a prey animal to the room of obligate carnivores. When he finally joined the circle, Jeremy shot him a dirty sneer but continued with the planned speech.

"Slip, you're going first against the tall blonde girl." Slip's eyes lit up, his lopsided grin barely holding back a dirty joke, "We don't have a good idea of what she can do, but we know it's tied to emotions and you can make her rage out if you annoy her bad enough. Set her off balance and restrict her as much as possible." Guy's eyebrow furrowed automatically before he could stop himself, drawing the ire of Jeremy's hateful eyes. This drew the attention of the other two team members, Slip raising his eyebrow questioningly and Terry keeping his gaze impassive. With all attention on him, Guy stuttered out his question.

"Would– wouldn't making her rage out be a bad idea? I know it's an instant match over but she could get real dangerous if–" Jeremy sneered at him, the intense expression making Guy's jaw close with a click.

"We have Domain as our referee, Guy. Shut your face." Jeremy's voice held a promise of punishment, and before Guy could even react, Jeremy's hand blurred and caught Guy on the back of his head, knocking him onto the lightly padded ground just beside Terry's feet. Guy quickly pulled in on himself, readying himself for a flurry of blows faster than he could react—his mind swimming so heavily that he couldn't even focus enough to use his link.

"Wait, wait, Jeremy!" Slip called, the shadow of the top half of the elastic man covering Guy's body, standing between the hair-trigger Baxter and Guy. "He's going to be fighting for the team in less than an hour, we need him to be able to stand, J!"

There was a moment of tense silence as the distinctive buzz of Jeremy's power hummed in the team's ears, threatening them at all time.

"Fine. Get up, bastard." Jeremy said after a long moment, and the word really cut deep, even if he had been called the insult thousands of times jokingly, somehow Jeremy made it into a real insult. Guy did as he was talk, not daring to even look at Slip, though he no doubt had an apologetic expression on his face.

"Next," the blonde-headed boy continued as if nothing had happened, "Terrence, you're up against the Asian brat. He has control of fire, apparently a magic type link. Crush him." Terry didn't even nod, but Jeremy moved on. Guy wanted to know about the magic type link so bad, a subtle dream of Guy's was to have Awakened with one, if he had ever Awakened that was. Now he was stuck with an undefined link, only adding to the ridicule and despise.

"Guy," the voice was heavy with that same despise and burning malice, "you're fighting against the chick with the fucked-up face. If you fuck up, I'll make sure you get one just like it." It took Guy a moment to remember who Jeremy was talking about, but he remembered the scar before long. With a slight nod, Guy could only hope that she was weak.

"I'll be facing the axe idiot." Jeremy finished, letting the team sit for a moment in silence, but finally adding, "Fuck them up."

---

​

The Arena was huge. Way bigger than Aaliyah had remotely expected from the Underground, even after living out of the Gym for weeks upon weeks now. Aaliyah had seen the Arena and its smaller siblings on the map that she'd managed to socially engineer her way into getting through a quick email scam, but it hadn't had any strict measures of size, only questionably scaled diagrams.

The Arena was the main stage, where many of the biggest fights between teams of Linked happened during training, usually between teams that had begun training roughly at the same time. While it wasn't as big as the Gym in pure surface area, it made up for it by having branches of even more arenas, smaller than the main one, but used for smaller scale battles, and then even smaller ones with specific purposes.

And in this massive room, Aaliyah was standing just about in the centre of it. At the moment, it looked more like a traditional gladiator's arena than anything modern, even though she knew that the Arena was entirely linktech, capable of changing and repairing its own terrain almost instantaneously if it was a pre-set arena schematic. Something one of the hypercognitives who had worked on the project was happy to spill after a back and forth for a few weeks while Aaliyah pretended to be a reporter for an exceedingly reputable scientific paper, doing a story about 'Structural Linktech and the Future of Architecture.'

Now that Aaliyah stood inside of its walls, looking out the sizeable crowd that sat in the seats surrounding the circular Arena, she couldn't help but feel anxious despite all the preparation and planning. Walter had pulled every piece of info they had on the other team, which mostly came from Ajax and herself, and had formulated a decent strategy for most of the matchups.

Though Aaliyah knew it was all going to fall apart in no time.

Aaliyah wanted so badly to hide her abilities and play the weakling, a position of power in it's own right, but she was being pulled into these situations with almost no control over her own trajectory. She had just wanted to stay quiet and coast through training, then do some corporate jobs and disappear to nowhere. Walter, Ajax, and Mirah had other plans though, and they were going to take advantage of her reluctance to leave training, the only way for her to get out of the hole she had dug herself in life.

The crowd was pretty quiet for a group of people about to watch a highly advertised set of matchups, probably because everyone understood what this was. It wasn't combat training or anything even remotely close to it, it was a declaration. It was a public beheading. Ajax had slighted them, and now Jeremy Baxter, son of the High Order, was going to crush them under his bootheel, and everyone was going to watch, even the AASAU was going to sit by and do nothing to help.

The crowd, previously entertaining themselves with quiet chatter hushed down to nothing as a boy shorter than Aaliyah walked out from on of the many entrances into the Arena. Other than the boy's beanie, he was kitted out in protective gear more advanced than the standard-issue stuff that Aaliyah was currently wearing.

Simultaneously, two men walked out onto a balcony that overlooked the Arena. The distinctive forms of both Willem and the suited man they had met only hours before. The beanied boy ended up standing on his own designated spot, only five or so metres away from Aaliyah, as the smug, self-impressed voice of the suited man booming over a hidden microphone.

"Team A," The man held his arm out towards the beanie kid, "versus Team B. This will be a one of one match with all matches completed regardless of win loss ratio. This match will be overseen by trainer Willem and Domain." As the voice stopped booming from the walls, a bright glow covered the entire space of the Arena with a green sheen, before dropping back into its regular sandy tone. Aaliyah didn't know what had just happened, and she could only assume that it was the link of the suited man who called himself Domain.

She didn't like this.

She didn't like it at all.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Bisque! A massive thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 35: Flinn

Aaliyah stood only a few metres from the other kid, the image of a street kid with a little bit of success under his belt. Aaliyah had seen so many just like this one, cocky and too smarmy for his own good.

They were smart, usually, Aaliyah could give them that. Conniving and socially intelligent, but because they thought that, they were vulnerable to the same cons they were running. Usually, they thought themselves unassailable underneath whoever it was they kowtowed to, only to get themselves fucked up because they acted stupid.

But if it were that easy, Aaliyah would be able to wipe the floor with he kid just by exploiting the weaknesses in his own mentality. This kid, though, was something different. He acted like the sort of kid that Aaliyah knew, but it was armour, a layer of defence before the truth.

"G'day there, good lookin'!" The kid called with a sleazy smile. Aaliyah didn't even hive him the satisfaction of rolling her eyes at his play for her frustration.

"Don't even bother." Aaliyah called back, voice as flat as can be, "We both know those games, and they don't work against someone who's in on the trick. Put away the marked cards, slick." The kid held a hand to his chest, as if he were wounded.

"Hey, who's to say that I don't actually find ya good looking?" While he was wearing a classic gaudy grin, his eyes showed a little more of the cold hearted nature you needed to run a ruse like he was.

"The match will begin in the next thirty seconds! Please listen carefully to the rules." Domain's sly voice called out with a classic presenter's pitch.

"I don't doubt that you do, slick. Only that you're so far down outside my league." Aaliyah slipped the last word in right as the pompous man in the balcony above began reciting the rules of the matches. The kid across from her clearly wanted to say something, but couldn't get a word in edgewise, leaving Aaliyah with the last word on the matter.

She half listened to the rules, the most notable of which was 'no death blows'. Willem had briefed them on the rules beforehand, but they were mostly superfluous to what the judges considered the rules at the time. The rules were set up in just the right way for it to work between two judges if they played nice with each other, but if they didn't then the match was just as much a battle between the teams as the judges' authorities.

"With the rules out of the way, the match will begin in ten seconds!"

Immediately after Domain had said so, the boy had said something snide in an attempt to the Aaliyah riled up, but she didn't even bother to let it reach her mind, listening only to the loud beeps counting down the time until the match started. She let her cold eyes rest on the boy's face dispassionately, waiting for the match's start to truly call upon her link. The beanie kid let the expression fall off his face, assuming the emotions he was actually feeling beneath his guise.

Cold dispassion. Just like her.

"Begin!" Domian's voice thundered throughout the Arena, and Aaliyah had already won the first move in this farce of a match.

Aaliyah could call upon her rage and her internal trust easily now. The fire and cold interlocking on her skin, leaving her with a fiery focus. Clearly the kid had underestimated just how powerful Aaliyah was as she rocketed forth from a kick at the ground. She had never been able to truly test the limits of her mobility like this, so the forward momentum she created was almost uncontrollable.

Almost.

In what could only be a fraction of a second, she was in front of the kid, dispassionate eyes filling with a note of shock before she planted a fist into his gut. She felt the impact, the resounding thump as her fist made contact with his body, but all the visceral points of the impact didn't fool Aaliyah.

With a quick step, she launched herself back a few metres away from the kid who was pretending to be surprised. Just as her fist left his body she felt a sensation like grasping onto a writhing snake. Now that she was a few metres away, retreating from the sensation, she still found herself face to face with the beanie wearing kid.

"Well, that was a pretty good first move, gotta say, darl." But the grin soon split his face as her eyes widened opening as wide as they could to capture every little detail of the moment. If she didn't, she wouldn't have seen the snakelike form of the kid's arm whipping towards her.

This was where Aaliyah made her first mistake, and she knew it from the moment she'd done it. Aaliyah ducked underneath the swinging arm and tried to dive out of the way, further from the appendages.

The moment that Aaliyah understood that she had made a mistake was when a thick rope of the boy's body slammed into her gut as she was diving. She was sent upwards a few metres, the wind being knocked from her lungs, a line of fire burning across the skin of her gut like she'd been whipped with a rope.

She gasped with pain, but in just the nick of time, she managed to see the next rope coming towards her, threatening her with the capture. In a rare moment of athletic genius, Aaliyah flipped herself so the rope impacted her feet, and pushed off as hard as she could only barely escaping the rest of the rope that naturally tried to wrap around what it had hit.

For a moment, Aaliyah was soaring through the air like a bird, free from the combat that she was going to inevitably be embroiled in as soon as her feet touched the ground. She flipped gracefully planting her feet into the soft sand that absorbed much of the impact of her fall.

She looked up towards where the boy was, and all she could see was a writhing mass of extended limbs and torso, curling in on each other and wrapping together. It was like seeing an alien organism, the mass of writhing muscle was so viscerally wrong that it almost pained Aaliyah to look at it. At him.

"Y'know," a voice called out from within the mass, "I'm honestly a little impressed. When Bax looked me in the eye and told me to do everything short of going all out, I was a little sceptical." A limb separated and waved itself in a familiar gesture.

"But you've really done a good job. You're powerful, quick on your feet and managed to evade me a couple times. It's impressive!" Aaliyah knew that tone of voice too well. When the predator had its prey by the neck, ready to rip it to shreds alive. She backpedalled furiously, which was her next mistake.

Suddenly, her legs were swept out from under here, a powerful cord of muscle whipped at her calves with a slap so hard that it tore into her flesh. She almost screamed as she was put to the ground and the mass of writhing nightmares descended on her. The limbs were merciless as she stared into the hollow maw of the beast, threatening to consume her whole. They wrapped around every limb tenfold, the muscle so powerful as it wrapped around her body over and over, forcing her to take shallow breaths instead of the deep ones she'd need to be able to scream out to surrender, the lifeline she'd been clinging to this entire match.

With her entire body wrapped within the black centre of the tentacles, she saw the upper section of the man's torso appear in the wall of the black sphere, blocking off all sight from the outside.

"This is why I wear that stupid fuckin' hoodie, y'know?" Beanie kid said as he looked around the black sphere distastefully, "The colour makes this look less like someone's gonna get raped, and more cool. At least I hope so, 'ey?" He chuckled, raising an eyebrow at Aaliyah who had to focus on her small breaths to keep herself from passing out.

"I'm basically under orders to fuck you up really bad in here, and there really isn't much that could stop me from giving you a whole body case of rope burn and a year in hospital with almost all of your bones broken, so I'll cut the shit." Aaliyah sneered at him, but it didn't even seem to register.

"You aren't some weak ass street kid like the rest of the idiots in here are, you're probably even better than me, but in here you're small fish again. I want things in the future, and you do too. I know a few things here or there that might give your team a leg up." Aaliyah… was relieved.

Odd to say in a situation that was so disadvantageous to her, but she realised that the world wasn't so different in here after all. Her team had skewed her perception, making her doubt her abilities multiple times, which made her useless. But here, it was all deals and handshakes under the table, just like how it was out there.

She nodded, her face falling into the expression she'd worn and perfected over the years that she'd done deals with some of the most dangerous fuckers in town. Her eyes bore into his, pinning him to the wall with them, like she had many who were even more powerful than he was, the only affirmation was his eyelid twitching ever so slightly.

"Go. On." She gasped out, having to quickly breathe after each word just to recover from saying then and the kid grinned again.

"Well, I'm thinking I give you info about all the other toughies in here, maybe even some of our own team if you're nice enough. I have some Order contacts in the AASAU, so I could try get you admin data without you having to fish some poor sod's email for it." Aaliyah tried to snort and couldn't quite do it, but the small exhale and facial expression sold in.

"In return, I get some juicy info about your team and anything else I might wanna know at a later date. First, I wanna know who each of you are, starting with you." Aaliyah narrowed her eyes at the boy, trying to sell it as if there was any difficulty in agreeing to the deal. If only he knew that two of the team were basically impenetrable mysteries, one was about as boring as you could get, minus the gang lawyer parents, and the last was her.

The bombshell.

After a long moment of faux consideration, she nodded gently, a grin splitting the boy's face.

"Alright, I'm gonna loosen the restraints, and you're gonna say your name. Your full name."

Aaliyah nodded, looking the kid dead in the eyes neutrally. Aaliyah had been counting seconds, which might seem like a moot point now, but something very important was coming, and Aaliyah wasn't going to miss her bus.

The snake-like appendages and bindings unfurled from her chest slowly and carefully, which almost made her anxious that the beanie kid didn't have full control over them, that they might accidentally cave in her ribcage.

"Alright, speak." He commanded, and she just raised an eyebrow at him. He rolled his eyes and gestured for her to go on. She mumbled a reply hoarsely, making the boy move closer to her. After another second she spoke again at the full volume she could.

"My name is Aaliyah Flinn."

The boy's head whipped around to look at her in a mixture of horror, surprise, and rage. It was a look she'd seen hundreds of times now on the face of anyone that had learned who she was, and this only confirmed it for her. She grinned as the binding and restraints loosened around her unintentionally in his shock.

"You should be careful when you're fucking with the Monarch's successor, street rat." She said devilishly, before counting the last seconds down in her head. She gathered all the breath she had and yelled.

"I surrender!"

There was silence for a moment, the sound of her yell dulled by what had to be multiple layers of muscle and fabric that the beanie kid had formed into the jumbled mess of appendages. The boy's head whipped around the space for a second before turning back to her, a look of bewilderment. However, just as he was about to speak, there was a thunderclap of sound.

"Team B has forfeit match one." The voice was calm as could be, but the sound shook through Aaliyah's muscle and bone, vibrating the mass of appendages so much that small pinpricks of light could be seen peeking through. The beanied boy closed his eyes and sighed in exasperation, loosening the bindings around Aaliyah and chucking her out of a hole he made in his sphere with a little more force than was strictly necessary.

When Aaliyah dragged herself up from the ground, she found the beanied boy standing in the sand as if nothing had ever happened. That is, if it didn't look like a million snakes had crawled across the sand and formed him.

"Fucking Flinn." He spat vehemently. "I'll contact you later. Next time we're fighting though, I'mma fucking crush you." He didn't even give Aaliyah time to ask his name, not that she would have. She had been lucky to get the drop on him like that. It wouldn't work again. She had no doubt that beanie kid really would crush her.

The perks and downfalls of having the Flinn name.


A/N: Thank you to my two 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my two 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 36: Crush

Walter and the rest of the team rushed down to the waiting area from their spots in the rows of seats, bursting into the room and waiting with bated breath as they waited for Aaliyah to return through the door. As soon as the door cracked open, Aaliyah stumbled in clutching her stomach.

"Aaliyah! Are you okay? Do we need to–" Walter began but Aaliyah growled at him, red blotches of frustration dancing across her skin.

"Shut it, short stack. Help me lay down." Walter rushed to do just that, and Ajax stayed close, just in case. The tall blonde woman was laid on a nearby bench that sat a metre or two from the wall, allowing her to simply sit and breathe, the bench wide enough to trust that she wouldn't spontaneously fall off.

"Do you want me to call for first aid?" Ajax's voice cut through the fog of pain and sudden exhaustion that Aaliyah was experiencing, though it wasn't a yell. Ajax's voice was a gentle thing when it wanted to be.

"I'm fine. I might not recover fast as I might if I was happy, but I'll be up and about in thirty minutes. Pretty damn hard to be happy when I feel like a train hit me in the gut." Ajax nodded solemnly, moving away from Aaliyah's side to give her space and sitting on another bench across the way.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know he could do that." Ajax said simply but Aaliyah just snorted in response, denying him any real verbal one. Walter spoke up after a moment, concerned.

"Well, I guess he couldn't have done that in the cafeteria." He sighed as he raked his fingers through his short black hair, "I'm up next, so we can only hope that whoever they send out won't be hiding the ability to turn into a mass of tentacles."

"How long do we have between matches?" Ajax asked, and Walter replied. It was about five minutes between them, almost no time to do anything but wait. In fact, while it only felt a like a few seconds, those five minutes passed. There was a light that went a bright green next to the door that led into the Arena's main stage. With a gulp, Walter pushed himself towards the doors with nervous energy coursing through his veins.

"Stay safe." Was the simple encouragement Walter received as the doors closed behind him, the scarred girl on the other end of the words looked towards him with her usual stalwart stoicism. He gave the girl a nod as he turned his back on the softly closing doors, walking up the small incline towards the beginning of the large open field of sand.

As soon as he was a few steps from the entranceway, part of the Arena's wall moved to cut off his exit, forcing Walter to move forward further. A glance around the outside of the Arena put into context just how many people were here to watch.

It couldn't have been a normal turnout, having at least a majority of the trainees present. When you see people in the cafeteria, you only see a certain percentage of the trainees at any given time, but now you could see them all seated together at the section at the Arena's border that was allocated for seating. It must have been somewhere in the realm of two people, all of them linked. If the stats that Walter had found on Linked populations were correct, then this was probably a good percentage of the Linked population within Australia.

It only solidified within Walter's mind that what Ivan Vasiliev had said in that interview was correct, the population of Linked was only increasing as time went on. Having this amount of Linked in one place, all here for training at one time, just meant that more Awakenings were happening as time went on.

Out of the corner of Walter's eye, he spied the instantly recognisable form of Fat Rich in the crowd. Even from this distance, the man's face was pulled into one of worry as he looked down from the seating with his own team. Walter hadn't met with the rest of the man's team yet, but if they were anything like Rich, then they were probably nice.

Walter nodded towards the man, making eye contact for a few seconds, but then turned his attention to the other side of the Arena as the bulky form of his opponent walked out.

"Team A and Team B, please approach your starting positions." The same smug voice called from the balcony above that looked over the entirety of the Arena, though it sounded a little more tense than earlier. Walter did so along with his opponent, unconsciously comparing himself to the bulky man as he did so.

This was the telekinetic that Ajax had talked about, and he didn't have much to actually say about the man other than he could wield a lot of force, and that maybe only Aaliyah and himself would be able to actually sustain underneath the force.

Walter cursed under his breath; this was the worst matchup he could have gotten. Not that any of the other matchups would have been great. They stood across from each other awkwardly, the other Asian man's eyes wandering over Walter's form and clearly finding him lacking.

"The match will begin in ten seconds!" It seems that you were expected to have listened to the rules when they were stated the first time. The anxiety built as the beeps slowly counted them down, Walter feeling his own body tense with the anticipation. Each count of the buzzer caused a small shock in Walter's brain, but when the longer sound that signified the start of the match, everything went quiet inside.

"Begin!"

The call from Domain was a little too slow for Walter, who had already let fire sprout into existence within his hands. The other man, however, didn't seem to care all that much for the fire. Walter could feel himself being pushed back by a wall of unrelenting force as his opponent's body tensed in concentration.

The wall of force, while not an actual wall, certainly acted like it. Walter tried to increase the length and heat of the fire in his grasp, but it battered uselessly against the wall in front of him, as if he were trying to actually melt a wall of metal.

With no other choice, Walter turned from the wall of force and sprinted in the direction it was pushing, then quickly circling around—hoping that the wall wasn't actually that large. Walter's general fitness was hardly anything to write home about, but doing quick, little movements like this were where he shined, agility always having been surprisingly good throughout his childhood.

Walter raced past where the wall of force had been pushing, managing to dodge the invisible wall and continue running towards the bulky man. Walter stretched out a hand, preparing to grow the flame into a long beam of fire, hoping that it'd reach the man and maybe cause some damage.

"Not so fast." The cold voice called, and Walter quickly found himself almost entirely entombed by force, squishing against his body severely, forcing him to be entirely still.

"God damn, man!" Walter growled, allowing his competitive spirit and adrenalin override any social anxiety he had. He glared at the other man as his flame spread out uselessly against the telekinetic force he was gripped in.

"You are weak." The man said plainly, standing stock still as he watched Walter struggle. "Your friend made a foolish mistake when he provoked Jeremy Baxter." Walter scoffed as he struggled more, to no avail, eventually letting himself go slack against the force.

"You think we don't know that? We're not idiots." The man didn't respond for a moment, letting the force around Walter close in even further and crush against his body, squeezing like a tube of toothpaste.

"You certainly act like idiots." The man's voice called out eventually, his voice continuing to be the neutral and droll tone that he'd spoken every word with. Walter yelled something barely comprehensible, but it wasn't meant to be.

In fact, Walter was acting. It was something that even Walter would more easily attribute to Aaliyah, with her proclivity to shift between 'characters' being one of the main points of contention between her and Mirah. Walter wasn't good at acting in social situations, but simulating a bit of pain to seem weak? That was easy.

Walter was collecting information; vital data that Ajax couldn't give him before the match. Sure, Walter knew that the man was telekinetic, but not how much force he could control, or how he controlled it. In only a few moments, he'd been able to figure out that the man wasn't able to do anything but focus on his control, making him unable to physically.

The man's control was impressive if Walter could relate at all. He was likely fighting to keep the force intact at every moment and if that was true, it was impressive that he could even speak aloud. In a way, there were some parallels between Walter's own link and this other man's telekinetic link. Why his elemental link was considered an undefined magic type and the other man's link wasn't was due to telekinetic links repurposing the kinetic energy in the surrounding area, rather than Walter's own link which seemingly conjured energy out of nothing.

In short, all Walter really needed was a way to break the man's concentration, which was easier said than done.

"You think we look like idiots?" Walter growled through the faux pain, "What do you think you look like, beating on a team of newbies? Has there even been a newer team than us come in yet?" The comment, while serving to legitimise Walter's act as genuine, did little else but make the other man increase the force crushing Walter's body. Walter groaned as it constricted, forcing him into an even smaller and more disadvantageous spot with every passing second.

However, the shift did allow for one good thing, along with all the newfound and very genuine pain. Walter's hand which had been stuck at an odd angle was now placed up against the invisible wall completely, the palm which the flame floated upon was not flush with the oddly shaped wall.

"If you could actually fight worth a damn, I'd consider that an insult." The man's voice didn't noticeably change, but Walter could swear there was an undertone of malice in there somewhere. Walter grinned, he was getting through the stoic mask and it was buying him time. Rather than just crushing Walter until he passed out, the other man was prolonging it, though he didn't seem to be enjoying it, lending to the idea that he wasn't as interested in this as he would like to seem.

He was being ordered to do this.

"O–oh, is that right?" Walter said, struggling for breath against the crushing force as he desperately tried to conjure the flame further away from his palm than he ever had before, "So you're just fighting the weak guys because your master said so?" The man's face twitched, but the crushing force only solidified, pushing in further.

"Be quiet." The man said, the neutral voice unwavering in its calm disposition. Walter couldn't help but to sweat, finding the man's will almost unbreakable despite the insults actually getting to him. Walter tried to conjure the flame again and again, but he didn't have enough time. The neutral voiced man was pulling the walls in tighter ever second or two. Walter's knees were now pressed against his chest tightly, restricting movement almost entirely, his head pressed against the painful point of the bony knees. However, even with all the restriction, Walter managed to push out one last word, using absolutely every ounce of distaste he could.

"Dog."

The rage in the other man didn't extend to his face, but his eyes burned with it, and the kinetic walls closed in ever so slowly, taking pleasure in the horrifying feeling of being confined, trapped.

Walter found himself almost useless and any tiny bit of movement he'd been able to use before was entirely gone now. Even keeping his palm up against the kinetic wall cause an ungodly amount of pain, the kinetic wall sadistically crushing at his elbow and palm at the same time. He could feel the bones in his arm creak with displeasure, straining with everything they had to stay intact against the unrelenting force.

All Walter had been left with was the conjuring of his flame. All he wanted was a little flame, a candle was all it would take. Time and time again it would conjure itself against the wall, smashed between his hand and the almost impassable wall. But Walter could feel it. It was only a few centimetres of space between the interior and exterior of the wall. If he could just conjure the flame outside, he'd win. He could do it.

Walter couldn't even scream as the bone in his arm began to splinter, but it was in that pain that Walter succeeded. It was a failure at first but somehow the flame managed to pass the wall, conjuring barely half a metre from his hand. The moment that Walter realised he had done it, the pain flooded away from him, regardless of the force of the walls as they destroyed his arm further.

With one last push of willpower, he begged the flame to grow, to burn the man's body so bad that he'd lose any modicum of concentration. And so, the greedy flame replied.

There was a tremendous woosh as the flame brew big and bright, even more terrifying than what he'd ever conjured before. Walter's vision was clouded by the intense glow as he could hear the screams of the other man, the faint sickening smell of burning flesh managing to waft through the kinetic barrier.

The barrier was almost immediately dropped after, Walter also banishing his flame back to wherever it had come from. Walter's body flopped to the ground, landing unfortunately on his destroyed arm. The pain made Walter give a short scream of his own before he bit his lip to keep it down.

He looked up to see the other man, still standing where he had been with a massive patch of his skin-tight suit missing, leaving a clear view of his scorched flesh beneath. The wound was too severe to be called superficial, but with how Linked generally healed, it'd barely be a week before it was basically normal again.

However, the intense scowl on the man's face was enough to tell Walter that the other man didn't care.

There was an explosion of sand right next to Walter, the force of the impact sending a shockwave of vibration through Walter's body. One second, Walter was laying in the sand, and in the very next second he was flying through the air at blistering speed.

The last thing that Walter saw was the Arena's wall as he smashed into it.


A/N: Thank you to my three 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my three 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my two 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 37: Next Time

"Walter!" Ajax cried out as he saw the man's form go flying through the air at a ridiculous speed, limbs flailing wildly. "Fuck."

Ajax sprang from his seat within the small private seating area that they allowed for the teams to watch, racing down the stairs only a few metres away and bursting through the doors in the waiting room leading into the Arena itself.

As Ajax barrelled through the doors, he found the section of the Arena's wall sliding open, inviting him inside as a booming voice assailed his ears.

"Team A, disqualified by death blow rule infraction." As Willems words radiated throughout the arena, reverberating teeth in the heads of all present, Ajax's mind went wild. Had he just witnessed someone be killed in front of him? His own teammate? Ajax pulled subconsciously on the power of his axe, who was all too willing to grant it to him. His legs rocketed him forth towards the cloud of sand where Walter had been thrown.

"Walt!" Ajax called out as he reached the cloud, pushing through the unsettles sand, somehow capable of sitting in the air and getting into every nook and cranny as soon as you submerged yourself in it. Ajax frantically dug through the cloud to find Walter's form within in, laid on the ground at the foot of the wall; crushed in every sense of the word.

Ajax's first aid training kicked in, allowing him to immediately get the man to the recovery position, observing for breathing and any other signs of life. Though, Ajax wasn't hung in suspense for long, as the light movement made Walter groan with pain—a strange thing to be relieved by, but it was better than no response at all.

"Walter, you've just been hit really hard." Ajax said, his tone warm and comforting, "Can you tell me what just happened?" Walter responded with a groan that was a mush of seven different words, coming across as completely incomprehensible so Ajax. He was about to ask the boy another question, but a strong hand gripped him on his powerful shoulder.

"Good effort, kid. Time to let me do my job though, yeah?" Ajax whipped around to see a bedraggled looking man somewhere in his late twenties, though he looked much older because of the pure essence of exhaustion Ajax found on his face. The man was dressed in a general uniform that much of the staff can be seen in unless they are trainers or other personnel. However, instead of the neutral blue or green that the other uniforms came in, this was a white and red uniform—the symbolism obvious.

Ajax quickly moved away, not dumb enough to deny the medic his space. The older man gave Ajax a succinct nod, then moved in on Walter and looked him over quickly. In a few moments, the man grabbed at Walter's right arm, the one that had been crushed by his opponent's telekinetic force. The bone of Walter's forearm was totally shattered, sitting oddly at a fraction of its normal length, much of the splintered bone sticking from the skin at odd angles.

"Alright kiddo, this is gonna fuckin' hurt. On three." The man didn't even get to one. All in a single movement, the man pulled on Walter's wrist. Ajax could barely force himself to look, but as the medic pulled, there was a strange suctioning sound as Walter's bone pieces were pulled back into his flesh easily, sealing over as the obstruction was removed. Only a second after, you could hear a terrible grating and crunching noise from within Walter's arm, hearable even over the man's pained howls.

Ajax winced at the screaming, but sustained through it, watching the Linked medic work whatever he was doing on Walter's body. In only another moment, Walter's arm was totally fine, and in the next few moments the medic managed to clear up some other injuries like a few terrible looking impact wounds, another broken bone or two, and finally a patch of skin that had the equivalent of a terrible carpet burn.

"Good stuff." The man said with a small hint of satisfaction as he looked down at his patient's form. Walter was hardly looking good, but it was the difference between looking like a broken doll and having been beat up pretty bad.

"Alright, you're his teammate, right?" The medic turned to Ajax with a questioningly look.

"Uh, yeah. Ajax." Ajax said quickly, putting out a hand which was promptly shaken.

"Tom," he said, introducing himself, "now, you're going to need to keep an eye on him for a little while. He can sleep just fine now, I've reset his concussion, but his body is going to be in a really weird state for a good two days. You'll need to help feed him and help him throw up whatever gunk his body wants to get rid of now that I've gone in and messed around, alright?"

Ajax recoiled from the blast of instruction the medic had given him but ended up nodding once his brain managed to find its stride.

"Yeah, sure. Anything else I need to think about?" Tom hummed with though for a second before his eyes lit up, clapping his hands together in a moment of remembrance.

"Right! You'll also need to feed him twice his energy sachets a day. He'll barely be able to stomach it, but they absorb in fifteen minutes, so make sure he doesn't throw up until after that or you'll have to give him another." Tom gave Ajax a pat on the shoulder before starting his trip back to a small service door in a different side of the Arena.

"Stay safe, kid."

Ajax watched the man go, eventually deciding to take Walter back to the waiting room to rest, seeing as his match was up next. He scanned the Arena angrily but was unable to catch a glimpse of the other man who'd hurt Walter this bad. Though, right next to where Walter had been laying after being released from the telekinetic's grip, there was a massive hand imprinted into the sand. It made a lot of sense that the telekinetic's manifestation of his link was a hand, but it somehow made the act even more eerie.

"I've got Walter." Ajax said as he used his shoulder to push open the door to the waiting room, finding Mira, Aaliyah, and Willem inside.

"Is he alright?" Willem said quietly, his voice sounding a little constricted. Ajax almost wanted to be angry at the man, for letting this happen to one of his own trainees but couldn't find it within himself. Willem had told the team that his hands were tied, and that he could only be so helpful in the match, especially with the other trainer, Domain, breathing down his neck the entire time.

"Tom, the medic, fixed him up and said he needs to be looked after for a few days." Willem nodded severely.

"Tom does good work; Walter will be feeling much better in a few hours. The question is whether we want to call the match now." Ajax looked up from Walter's body with a little shock, Aaliyah and Mirah doing the same. Willem stared at each of them quietly before continuing, "I have grounds to stop the matches now. It wouldn't look good on your rap sheets, and the AASAU might even be able to penalise you if they really want to." Aaliyah scoffed loudly.

"Which they will, because the gang freaks have a hate boner for us." As inelegant as the phrasing might be, she wasn't wrong. Ajax didn't know what the AASAU would be able to penalise them with, but if Willem was bringing it up at all, it was probably nothing nice. Willem closed his eyes, scrunching his bushy brows with consternation for a few moments.

"I'll continue." Ajax said finally, making the trainer look up at him solidly. Willem was shorter than Ajax by a few inches more than a foot, but Ajax couldn't help but feel that the man could always look at him levelly.

"I will." Mirah's quiet voice concurred, almost frightening the other two teammates. She was always so passive and silent that whenever she spoke, it was if their minds here completely re-instituting her existence into their perception. Willem went quiet as he looked between the two willing combatants.

"Fine then." He said stoically, but quickly turned to Ajax, "Your fight will be in five minutes. Prepare."

The stocky man strode out of the room faster than his frame would have you believe possible, walking out towards the corridors rather than the Arena itself. Ajax wondered how the referees even got up onto that massive balcony that stretched over top of the Arena itself.

"I wonder if it has fingerprints." Aaliyah's voice mused, startling Ajax and Mirah out of their own thoughts, Mirah previously looking down at the quietly snoring form of Walter who was twitching restlessly.

"What?" Ajax said dumbly as he stared at the tall blonde girl, expression incredulous.

"The hand." She said thoughtfully, even going to far as to place a hand on her chin, "I wonder if it has fingerprints." Ajax looked at Aaliyah in dumbstruck silence for a few moments, before rubbing his face over with his hand, unable to stop the chuckles from leaking out of his lips.

"Seriously?" He asked, poignantly, "That's what you're focusing on right now? Whether the telekinetic hand has fingerprints or not?"

"Yeah, why not?" Aaliyah said, eyebrow raised, "It's interesting!"

After a long moment of silence, Ajax raised his hands to his cheeks and slapped against his face, letting a loud bark of laughter fill the room. He grabbed at the axe at his side, reassuring himself that it was still there, and then began to walk out of the room towards the Arena's doors.

"Aaliyah, you take care of Walter. I'll be back in a bit." There was a squawk of indignation from Aaliyah, who had been spontaneously laden with responsibility for her crimes, but Ajax walked out of the room too fast for her to truly respond to him.

He walked out into the centre of the Arena, lumbering forward through the wide area of sand. He found himself on the starting spot, a piece of the arena that was made of more compact material than sand, allowing for a small painted on black circle. Ajax sat heavily on top of it, releasing the axe from its holster at his side and placing it across his lap, letting time pass by—preparing himself for the fight to come.

"The fight begins in thirty seconds!" Domain's voice called, but Ajax ignored it, knowing that only now would his opponent be walking through their own doors. Ajax wasn't a fool, he knew who his opponent would be, the other man too proud to pick anyone other than himself. When Ajax looked up towards the light steps, he could hear approaching, it only confirmed his surety.

Before him stood a tall blonde, his blue eyes burning with a malice that only his predatory grin could do any justice.

"Good to see you again, Axe idiot." The man called, Jeremy Baxter being his name, "Have you been enjoying the effects of your little scuffle so far?"

Ajax didn't respond, letting the time trickle by as the beeping began.

"Ten seconds remain until the match begins!" Domain called again, though the voice was completely ignored by both of the men in the Arena, Ajax staring into the other man's eyes with his own coal black eyes. The beeping counted down till the last moment, yet before the final, long beep sounded, Ajax's voice rang out in the Arena.

"I'm going to slap you." Jeremy Baxter's face scrunched in immediate confusion, but as soon as the long beep sounded, Ajax's hand flew.

Ajax's axe was a simple thing, only caring so much about how many it was protecting, but sometimes the rules could be bent. So as Ajax's mind was absolutely set on retribution, on a clear counterattack to the vicious mauling that Jeremy Baxter had brought upon his teammate, his axe responded in kind.

With a dep thrum of power, Ajax's hand burst forward at superhuman speed, connecting with Jeremy Baxter's face with a mighty crack. However, that was hardly the end of Ajax's supplied power. Baxter's tall but skinny form was sent flying at a sharp angle, parallel to the ground, skimming against the sand like you would skip a flat stone across water.

Ajax had felt something crack underneath his glorified palm-strike, likely the other man's jaw. But Ajax didn't care. He had accomplished what he'd wanted to, and as Jeremy Baxter's body slammed into the Arena's wall, much like Walter had, the axe's power ebbed away from Ajax's grasp.

Ajax didn't have to wait long for the reaction to his blow as the crowd at the edges of the Arena, who had almost stayed silent throughout the matches, sucked in a collective breath.

However, even as that breath was being taken, Ajax spotted a quick flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Ajax tried to make himself move quick enough, but the fist was already embedded into his gut, then three others in immediate succession. Ajax counted eight more blows, kicks, and punches, all of which he had no capability of blocking, any power he'd possessed leaking from his hands like water.

"That hurt." The menacing voice called out from behind Ajax, yet even as Ajax whipped around to stare at the boy, Jeremy's form blurred into a streak of black and blonde—the next indication of his whereabouts only being a knee slamming into Ajax's chin.

Ajax had no time to react, only capable of shielding himself from the blows as each subsequent blow forced him to his knees, then finally forcing him to shield over his head. Jeremy Baxter could move faster than Ajax could see, each blow feeling as if he were being hit with a sledgehammer, multiple times a second.

A few times, Ajax tried to grab out at the other man's leg, but only resulted in having his fingers attacked by the ludicrously fast man. Ajax was simply waiting now, allowing each blow to hit without contest. His axe only gave him enough power to protect himself from his ribs and breaking, but if the man had anything more than his limbs to work with as weapons, Ajax's flex would be rendered off his bone within moments.

It was then that the beep sounded, the same one that Aaliyah had surrendered to, despite being inside a ball of limbs, and the same one that Walt had never made it to. If Ajax could be called anything, it was resilient.

"I surrender." Ajax called, his voice booming against the searing pain that burnt in seemingly every muscle his body had to spare, and thus the match was called with Willem's own voice booming out afterwards, forcing Ajax's opponent to stop senselessly pummelling him.

"Well then." The malice filled voice rang out, his words only a little impeded by a breathiness you'd expect from a light jog, "That was a good bit of stress release. Maybe next time I'll knock you out, if I'm bored."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 38: Fae

Guy watched as the other, much taller man smacked Jeremy across the Arena with a powerful slap. That single action had been ludicrously gratifying, watching as the massive dickhead was launched with a resounding sound.

Though, Guy knew that it was for naught, nothing more than a fluke shot that'd be paid back a thousandfold, almost literally. The ensuing chaos was just that, chaos. The massive man was beaten to his knees easily, hardly able to defend himself against the almost unending flurry of blows that Jeremy was capable of dishing out.

When the other man had surrendered, Guy had almost been sad. Just a tiny hope that the man would be able to pull off a dramatic return to form and smack Jeremy around like a blow-up doll. Guy sat in the team's seating, a seat away from Trip, who was surprisingly quiet given the impressive display on his part.

Guy had seen Trip go full tentacle monster a few times in training, but not quite to that degree. As much as the other boy was tangentially on his side, Guy wasn't foolish enough to actually believe that Trip would really go out on a limb for him, so they kept their mutual distance from one another. He really didn't want to somehow find himself on the other end of Trip's link.

"Guy." A voice called dangerously from behind the door leading into the waiting room. Guy stiffened, but hastily got up from his seat and rushed into the room, not willing to leave the caller waiting.

Guy entered and saw a perfectly fine Jeremy Baxter, the cold and dangerous expression laden on his face. Usually, the man at least put on a show of malice or hotheadedness, but he was only left with a cold expression today, the signifier for being in a very bad mood.

"You're going out to fight with the scarred-up bitch now," Jeremy said heavily, "If you lose the fight, you'll lose a finger. I don't give a fuck what your lineage is, you aren't one of the High Order, no matter what they say." The other man, seemingly losing the will to even insult the pudgy boy, turned his back on Guy and stalked towards the seating area like a hungry predator.

Guy was used to the insults and treats by now, being bombarded with them most days of the week. Today, it was a little different, what with the fight just around the corner. Guy knew that he'd be expected to walk out into the Arena in little over five minutes from now, then would have to wait another minute until the match started.

Guy pushed his stubby fingers through his brown, curly hair and sighed shakily, trying to calm the nerves that were making him shake more with each moment that passed. He'd never done any actual combat matches before today, unlike the rest of the team which all seemed to be skilled in one aspect of combat or another, having likely be trained by the High Order, or by mor practical means.

Guy had been shocked when the magic link kid had managed to do any damage to Terrence. The Vietnamese man had always been exceptional at ending a fight, mostly by crushing someone easily and quickly—all of the training dummies that Domain had supplied them hadn't lasted long with Terry constantly testing his link on them. Trip had done as well as expected, with most of his link being geared towards stopping someone. Guy couldn't tell what had happened inside the ball of tentacles that Trip had made, but he'd been exceptionally dour afterwards with a dangerous glint in his eye that never meant anything good.

The fight between axe guy and Jeremy had been as expected, not that Guy had been briefed on links of their opponents. In fact, that was what currently mortified Guy most, was the scarred girl having some straight counter to his own link, nullifying anything he could possibly do in the fight and earn him a severely shortened finger.

Guy turned his nervous eyes to the muscled telekinetic sitting in the corner of the waiting room on a mat, meditating. Of course, he'd been healed by the Domain's recommended healer and most of his wound was now diminished to not much more than an angry, red mark emblazoned across his stomach and chest. He tried not to keep his eyes on the exposed wound for long, but his eyes flitted back to it over and over, the faint fear that something similar would happen during his fight growing into a much larger mountain over the course of only a few seconds.

Guy sat on a wooden bench, staring at nothing as his mind was consumed by the anxiety. Though Guy kept a strange rationality through it all, a small part of his brain capable of ticking lick clockwork in an orderly fashion, despite the racket that surrounded it.

That internal timer managed to alert Guy that he needed to move out into the Arena and his body responded as if on autopilot. The miasma of anxiousness only began to recede from his mind when his shoe touched the much harder, claylike surface that the starting plates were made from.

In an instant, Guy blushed with embarrassment, only just realising that he still had his shoes on. With shaking hands, he weakly untied the shoelaces of both shoes and tried to slip his sockless foot out of the tight-fitting prison.

As Guy struggled to get his foot from his shoe, he glanced up at the other starting spot and saw a set of green eyes staring back, watching as he shimmied uncomfortably to try and rid himself of his shoes. The moment of surprise made Guy yelp and fall onto his ass, coinciding almost perfectly with a wave of shame as he realised that far more than just his opponent was watching him.

His mind was overrun by the distilled moment of full-bodied cringe that purveyed almost anyone that was watching. Guy wished, at that moment, that a convenient gunshot would ring out and the piece of lead would be meant just for him.

With a little bit of internal willpower, he managed to take off his shoes, placing them just beside the starting plate. He rose from his sitting position with a furious blush running from his cheeks and down his neck and even onto his chest.

Guy kept his eyes off the crowd, which he was sure held a few mocking glances, though he was able to make eye contact with his opponent who seemed decidedly unperturbed by the veritable comedy act that Guy had become.

Soon enough, Guy found himself unable to pull away from her gaze and its intensity, wrapping him in a blanket and isolating him ever so slightly from the outside world. He was enraptured for reasons almost beyond his own understanding. All that he could possibly put together in that moment was that she was extraordinarily beautiful.

It was a strange, surreal beauty, something that would feel distinctly out of place amongst a list of 'the most beautiful people alive'. She certainly had some of the traits that lent her a beautiful facial structure, but there was more there, hiding behind the classical form. It was almost the same as his own mother's beauty, in a roundabout way, though hers was even more intense. Looking into his opponent's eyes was like looking into a flawed gemstone and turning it in your fingers, seeing the light dance and refract in ways it never could if it were 'perfect'.

Guy was almost shocked when the first countdown beeps began having somehow missed Domain's announcement, his own trainer's voice blending into the background noise of his mind. Guy focused his mind elsewhere, half-heartedly preparing himself for whatever may come after that final beep sounds. He lowered his stance, standing in a wide legged and extremely stable position as his eyes tried to focus more on the rest of her body, rather than her eyes.

It was by the seventh beep that his opponent also changed her stance somewhat, stiffening to prepare herself to retreat from anything he tried to throw at her—a stance that Guy was more than accustomed to throughout his less than stellar training.

The final, long beep sounded, and Guy forced his sluggish mind to utilise his link and the effect was immediate.

Guy could feel as his toes scrunched in the light dusting of sand over top of the hard, clay-like material that made up the starting plate both he and his opponent stood on. His link sparked to life, almost hungry to be used, the spark travelling down his legs and into the skin of his feet, making contact with the material below.

With an uncomfortable feeling, his body began to change rapidly, feeling almost as if something was overtaking his body, like a million ants climbing across his skin—each making their own winding path for the others to follow and branch from. Within only moments, Guy found that his skin had been entirely changed into the hard material below his feet, the deeper flesh beginning to change as well but at a slower pace, something that he could only barely consciously effect.

However, Guy didn't have the time to take control of his link, whipping his head up to keep his eyes on his opponent's movements, preparing for the inevitable strike.

Yet that strike never came.

In fact, his opponent had even relaxed her stance, just staring idly at the last of his skin transforming into the material, even his hair becoming stiff and hardened as it transformed with ease. Guy knew that in this sort of situation, he should be even more alert than usual—the likelihood that his opponent needed time to set up an attack or to charge up a powerful blow of some kind was exponentially growing the longer that 'nothing' happened.

Yet, Guy couldn't force himself to be on alert. He checked himself over for mind controlling abilities, going through the checklist for a compromised mental state, but found himself clean of any sign. He could remember his name, birthdate, family member's names and faces, he wasn't unduly attracted to the woman, or showing any signs of infatuation. Yet Guy could feel his muscles relax as he stared at the woman across from him.

"You aren't the same." The sudden words made Guy jolt, though the contact he had with the starting plate stopped him from moving too much.

"What?" Guy said, suspicion evident in his voice. He was waiting for the moment that his opponent would burst forwards and pummel into his hardened body, or throw him around with telekinesis, but Guy was cursed to wait for an attack to come, the overwhelming downside of his own link.

"You are different than your team." The cool voice wafted through the climate-controlled air of the Arena. Guy found himself even more confused as he looked into the woman's face, trying desperately to find some ploy or trick to the words.

"I'd hope not." He replied stonily, still not giving the girl anything to work with just yet. In fact, he shouldn't even be talking to her, lest talking to her is a condition for her link to work. But when his eyes met hers, he found himself swimming in them like a soothing pool, cool against his battered and bruised skin.

"They are predators." Guy's lips quivered at the word. Predator. It was as if she had pulled the mundane word from deep within his mind.

"I don't have a choice." He said, despite her never asking, and she nodded quietly, the mess of dark brown hair brushing against her lightly darkened skin. It was such a simple response, but there was nothing extraneous to it. The simplicity of it was overwhelmingly refreshing to Guy, the total lack of barbs in her demeanour made him feel like he was talking to some human.

"We don't either." Her voice was soft even if her eyes were somehow like jade disks. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, the sudden connection in the most unlikely place had sent Guy into a strange whirl of emotional states.

"I can't not fight you." He said finally, feeling a small tearing sensation in his chest as he said them. The woman nodded again, but still didn't move to attack. They gazed at each other for many more moments before she let her voice be heard again.

"I can't fight." Guy scrunched his brows.

"At all?" She nodded, leaving Guy with a mind set into a flurry of clashing emotions. She couldn't fight, so she wouldn't go after him, and he couldn't go after her at all. Guy looked down at his feet mournfully, finding them attached powerfully to the clay-like material below. Anchoring was what he called it. He was able to attach himself to something he could stand on, and his body would quickly become whatever that material was, no matter what.

"Do we… just stand here?" Guy asked, but barely even received a facial response from the girl opposite him. The seconds passed with a befuddling slowness, staring at his opponent for any hidden motives she might be waiting to spring on him, but nothing changed. All of a sudden, there was a long beep, signalling when you could formally surrender, the cruel rules keeping someone within a losing match for at least a minute.

"I surrender." The quiet voice called simply, waiting for the resounding boom of the other trainer's voice, the one that Guy didn't know the name to. Guy understood that it was really the girl's only option, seeing as she could fight, and he couldn't move, but it was still baffling.

The voice of his opponent's trainer resounded throughout the Arena, signalling the end of the match and his 'victory'. The girl quickly turned on her heel and began to walk back towards her own team's waiting room.

"Wait!" Guy called out as he unanchored himself from the ground, taking a few steps as the heavy material he was made of thumped against the soft sand. "What's your name?"

"Mirah." The girl said without turning to face him, continuing her walk away from him.

"I'm Guy!" He yelled, just loud enough that he was sure she could hear him, though she made no gesture that she had. He watched as she quickly made it to the door of her waiting room and disappeared within, leaving Guy to live within his tumultuous mind.

Guy began to walk back to his own waiting room, the heavy steps slowly becoming lighter as the material his skin and flesh had formed into returned to their natural state instead.

In a strange way, Guy felt as though he'd somehow met a creature of legend, a mythical being as incomprehensible to the human mind as the laws of the universe were. She had said only a few words but had wrapped him in a whirlwind of emotion with them, all the while soothing him with her indescribable eyes.

If someone told him that she was the daughter of Fae, the indescribable, wish-granting being that roamed the Scandinavian mountain ranges, he'd almost believe them. Almost. It'd be a terrifying day for humanity to know a second Fae walked the earth, only a sure sign that the end was drawing nearer than their darkest anxieties had feared.

Guy could only hope that she was as placid as she seemed, with a distinct lack of a need to seek someone out and ask; 'What is your deepest desire?'


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 39: Black Spot

Aaliyah watched dully as Mirah's opponent walked out of the Arena. The entire situation was just… bizarre. They had quite literally just stood still for the two minutes it took for the surrender signal to ring.

Aaliyah had been the only one of the team to witness the match, Walter still sleeping and Ajax deciding to rest on a bench in the waiting room and letting his battered body breathe for a few minutes.

As Aaliyah walked down the short flight of steps and through the door of the waiting room, she immediately locked eyes with Mirah. The other woman looked totally unperturbed, as comfortable as she could be—despite the tension she'd sensed in her before her match.

"What was that?" Aaliyah asked, a genuinely confused expression overcoming any mask she could have bothered to throw on. Ajax stiffly rose his muscled form from lying on his back, managing to sit in an upright position after a moment.

"What was what?" He asked, curious and worried tones in unison. He looked from Aaliyah's bewilderment and to Mirah's completely stoic, relaxed form.

"Nothing." Mirah said succinctly, though that only confused Ajax further.

"What do you mean nothing–" But his sentence was cut off by Aaliyah as she walked towards her other teammates, a sigh of exasperation exhaling from her lungs.

"No, she literally means that nothing happened. Actually, nothing happened, they just stood there and talked or something." Aaliyah turned from Ajax to Mirah, ignoring the stunned, strangled noise that came from his throat, "What'd he say?" Aaliyah demanded, putting her hands on her wider hips, using her height to bear down on the other girl.

Mirah remained as blank as ever, looking back at the other girl's soft intimidation tactic with total unconcern, "He wasn't the same as the others." She said finally, and Aaliyah pounced.

"Did he say that or did he–"

"He isn't the same as you." Mirah said, her soft voice cutting through any words Aaliyah had prepped to interrogate Mirah with.

"Woah, woah!" Ajax said, struggling to his feet as his muscles complained and screamed in a slowly diminishing pain, "There's no need for that, Mirah." Ajax moved to stand just off to the side of the two girls, ready to stick out his arms and restrain Aaliyah if she decided to throw a punch, even if she'd never done so in the past.

Aaliyah's face flinched; the subtle flicker was so stark on her face that even Ajax could see it clearly. Her expression was usually so tightly controlled, the picture of neutrality or genuineness. Ajax had learned to ignore the woman's face and look for small other tells, though he'd found none. Regardless, her face was the most tightly controlled thing about her, and for the unintentional flinch to be visible at all…

"And I am?" Aaliyah said quietly, her eyes glazing over as she stared into the younger woman's jade-coloured eyes, feeling the strange, captivating power they had. Mirah blinked slowly a few times before responding, almost like she was intentionally drawing out the atmosphere of the situation.

"A snake." She said finally, making Aaliyah's nostrils flare in anger, "A predator."

It was the first time that Aaliyah had seriously considered punching Mirah, the rage bubbling to her skin in splotches of a raw, bright red. Though, even with the colour of her anger showing right on her skin, the other girl's eyes never wavered to do so much as check, holding Aaliyah's gaze with a steadiness uncharacteristic for the girl.

"I see." Aaliyah ground out, her jaw almost bound shut with anger, her muscles making the bones of her jaw creak and her teeth complain under the stress. They looked at each other squarely for a while, but Aaliyah was the one to break it, turning and pacing out of the waiting room without even pausing to address Ajax or talk about the matches further.

She hated this.

Aaliyah walked through the corridors, through the almost entirely barren Gym, through the path towards the elevators, and immediately rising to floor eight. A few seconds later she was in her room, throwing off the still sweaty protectively padded suit and rushing into the shower. She'd have to return the gear later, something she probably should have done as she had walked past their private training area.

But Aaliyah was… not angry. It wasn't anger, not truly. It hurt her to even admit that the other girl's words had actually affected her in any way. She had been impervious from it for so long, any insult just sliding off an armour she had built for so long, memories of what she'd done and why she'd done it galvanising her against any of those worthless words.

But this wasn't that, Mirah didn't even know. None of the group knew that she was a Flinn, she doubted that Walter would even know who the Monarch was, and she gave Ajax a fifty-fifty chance. Whether Mirah would know was a mystery even to the girl herself.

Aaliyah was haunted by those eyes, the same ones she sometimes found staring back at her from the mirror. It was something born of pain and sorrow, a deeper depression and hurt than she could even possibly imagine, just the same as Mirah could likely even imagine Aaliyah's own pain. But Mirah wearing those eyes so openly at all was enough to tell that she was telling the entire truth, without fear or malice, or even doing so much as entertaining a spiteful thought.

Aaliyah was a snake. A predator.

How long ago was it that Aaliyah had prided herself on the label? It had been a mark of victory over the others who would make her their prey instead, the cutthroat nature of the life she had lived was rife with those who had wanted to harm her, no matter the cost. They'd all failed, but all it had taken was a few soft words from a girl just as broken as her.

That's what they were, broken dolls, left behind and forgotten, forced to find their own purpose. Aaliyah had found her purpose and she had carried it out, leaving her the remnants of the person she'd sacrificed to the alter of revenge.

Mirah, though, was finding hers now. She'd found something, a reason to build herself up from the pile of parts she'd been when she first got here, an image of a being that never really had the chance to become someone at all.

Aaliyah turned off the shower, having done little more than let the steaming hot water run over her slowly bruising skin from the asshole's tentacle limbs. She stood in front of her mirror, looking into the reflection of a starkly different Aaliyah than she'd pretended she was all this time.

This Aaliyah wasn't the snarky but ultimately milquetoast thing that she'd tried so hard to cultivate, even in the presence of Mirah, who could so clearly see through the act, having pinned her as a 'predator' from the moment they'd met.

The Aaliyah that stared back was ugly and dead, like a corpse left out to decompose for the amusement of the viewer. She could feel the deep, inky black rise to the surface of her skin, the colour of the horrific depression she pushed down so deep inside of her. Today, though, the bubble she'd forced the emotion into had been popped, a knife having been jammed ruthlessly into her gut by a blank faced girl telling the truth.

The truth, that's what had hurt her most. She knew she was a predator, just like her father before her, and she had even taken pride in it. Now, as she stood in front of another victim, one who was neither truly prey nor predator, she found herself unable to justify herself anymore.

Mirah had stood in that Arena, in front of a man with a link, and had assessed that he wasn't a predator. That he wasn't like her, or the other men in Jeremy Baxter's group of borderline psychopaths.

Aaliyah wouldn't have don't that. She didn't even think it'd be possibly for her to resist the urge to assert her own dominance over the opponent. Prey was weak; thus, the only solution was to be a predator instead.

"Oh, how distraught you've become over something as small as this, Aaliyah Flinn. Is this all it took?" She asked the self she saw in the mirror, and they only smiled back morbidly, the depression too thick in her expression to possibly pretend to smile.

She towelled herself off half-heartedly and walked out into her bedroom and sat on the bed without even bothering to dress into the bare minimum. Today, she'd do what she did whenever she felt things she didn't want to feel.

Research.

It was something Aaliyah was good at, one of the things that her father had taught her, and one of the things that had helped her bring him down. She placed her own laptop in the nooks of her crossed legs, balancing it on the curled in limbs. She couldn't trust the AASAU's laptops to not be wired a million different ways. She had her own process for checking over her laptop, to make absolutely sure that no-one without significant skill had tampered with the thing.

After the preliminary checks, she went into the computer, imputing a long and frankly ludicrous password into the login screen that she changed at least once a week. She entered the almost entirely barren desktop, there being strictly no personal items on it at all, nothing identifying and at least a few layers of protection before someone could get into the sensitive information on the machine.

She'd had a hyper cognitive customise the operating system for some drugs a few years ago, totally discrete and without any glaring backdoors. Of course, it wasn't entirely safe, but it was leagues more protection that she'd get from some piece of junk they sold on the open market, or even stuff from black market dealers.

Techtron would be the next best bet, but unless you were a massive client willing to spend millions of dollars for their engineers to build an operating system from the ground up in incomprehensible alien code, you were shit out of luck. Anything they sold even remotely retail had basically been reversed engineered by every hypercognitive and their scientifically enhanced rat.

After the lengthy login process, Aaliyah made it all the way to her preferred browser QSearch, along with a totally different search engine. Whiz, while excellent at finding things, was just about as secure as your back door; full of glass windows and a fifteen-dollar lock.

The searching process began with trying to find more on the Order dickheads. She found references to Baxter pretty easily, the foppish asshole and his father were rich as all get out and he'd been bailed out of prison a few times for minor offenses. The really serious ones never got to the papers, or even some of the social media sites. Much of the local media was owned by High Order members, something that Aaliyah had first learned from a public whistle-blowing post on a more underground forum she frequented in search of information security stuff.

They owned a majority share in some of the big players, who owned shell companies to fully own and operate said media companies. The web of corporate bullshit had kept Aaliyah awake for hours just to verify the information in her saved copy and, of course, it was about as legit as you could get.

It was a major deal in the info-sec circles, and even managed to leak out to the savvier publications, though they committed the cardinal sin of actually finding the man behind the leak using industry ties.

The man, who is only talked about with his username—Ties—out of respect, was murdered only hours after the identity leak. No points for guessing who did it.

She looked up the others, ones she'd had surprising difficulty actually pinning down. After a long time, she'd managed to find a picture of someone who looked suspiciously like the Asian man in some reports of linked gang member activity. It wasn't super helpful, but it did affirm that had been around in the area, making messes.

Her next try was to look through a collated list of known High Order members, though none of them were Asian, so he was either adopted or his family had managed to fly under the radar. Aaliyah leant back into the air behind her, staring at the ceiling and looking for some idea to go after.

"Late childhood deaths." She said suddenly, returning her eyes back to the screen and began to type rapidly, spamming the words into the search bar, trying to pull up extremely specific results. It was only thirty minutes of looking, an extremely short period of time for this kind of word, before Aaliyah found what she was looking for.

An article, written almost two years ago about a woman who'd lost five children and her husband in a freak car crash. Her sixth child and herself had lived only because they'd left the car to go into the service station.

The further that Aaliyah read into the story, the more it sickened her. She knew the truth behind the story, what'd really happened.

The woman, Binh Nguyen, was the owner of a massive department store chain, spanning across the entirety of Australia and some other countries. She had the power and influence to be in the High Order, and it seemed that she was just as psychopathic as all the rest of them. The recorded interview played, depicting Binh as she cried crocodile tears over her dead children and husband, then switching to the picture of the crash, where another car had somehow driven so fast into the side of the family's vehicle that it'd mangled the side of the other car.

There was no camera footage of the incident, nor any witnesses who could report seeing the car crashing into the family's vehicle, but Aaliyah knew it as soon as she saw the back of the car that had collided with the Nguyen family sedan.

The bottom of a gigantic palm was imprinted into the back of the car.

They switched frame again, showing a picture of the family that had been taken not a few hours earlier. Five teenagers, standing in front of their father, posing sillily for the camera, and at the edge of the pack was a muscled teen and his mother, standing with one hand on his shoulder.

Aaliyah looked into the eyes of the teen and saw it. She saw the death and darkness in his eyes, and the psychopathic glee in his mother's.

She had blooded him with his entire family.

Aaliyah closed the laptop, slamming the plastic lid, unable to stomach looking at the article any longer, the name ringing in her ears as she heard her laptop whirr—deleting and refreshing any information that may or may not have made its way onto her computer, giving her a fresh slate aside from what she'd consciously saved.

Terrence Nguyen. A man likely tortured into culling his entire family, and his mother, Binh Nguyen, standing by his side with glee as she was finally rid of the man, she'd used to create a child with a link.

The black spots only grew on Aaliyah's skin, lending a sallow look to the rest of her skin all the same.

Aaliyah wasn't going to sleep tonight.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Marisa E. and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 40: Foundation

The atmosphere of Ajax's room was a little dour, even for Mirah's tastes. Ajax had moved a chair to sit just by the doorway dividing his bedroom from the lounge room, his slumped form relaxing in the plush chair. In his hand he held a beer, resting it on his thigh gently between sips of the alcoholic beverage.

Mirah was careful around alcohol, having learnt from her first true experience with the liquid with Ajax a month ago. Now, she kept herself restrained to strictly non-alcoholic beverages, not only because of the slight embarrassment of how much more open she'd been after a few drinks, but also because of the lack of control.

"Why'd you say that to Aaliyah, Mirah?" Ajax asked, making Mirah almost bristle. The wording wasn't perfect, but if it was coming from Ajax then it wasn't meant to be a jab. Mirah shifted restlessly on Ajax's comfortable couch, a place she'd found herself more and more often in the past month.

"She is one." Ajax sighed. He'd always been slightly frustrated by Mirah's strangely closed off answers, and today was not an exception to the rule.

"I know that, but she was…" Ajax grimaced, then taking a sip from the bottle, "I don't know. She was getting closer to us, slowly."

"I don't trust her." Mirah said and Ajax rolled his eyes.

"As you've said. Multiple times." The light sarcasm was something that Mirah had to learn to both recognise and not take offense to, after she had actually brought up that she didn't understand what that tone meant one day.

"She needs to know that I know." Mirah added succinctly and Ajax sighed, about add his own piece to the conversation when a groan sounded from the bedroom making him tense up, ready to rush into the room and help Walter with whatever he needed.

Luckily, Ajax was able to react quickly when the retching noises from the room began. Ajax went racing into the room, collecting a bucket nearby as he disappeared into the room. With a sound of something that Mirah was far too well acquainted with, the massive man mumbled some words to the likely semi-conscious Walter within the room, returning out into the living room and walking by Mirah towards the bathroom with a grimace on his face.

A few seconds later, after Ajax had cleaned out the bucket and thoroughly washed his hands of the unfortunate splatter, he returned to his spot next to the doorway, grabbing his beer from the table and taking a long swig as a reward.

"Yeah look." Ajax said after a long moment of contemplation, "I'm not going to pretend I understand the whole thing between you two. I just think we need to actually build a team here, and so far I've only got you onboard. I said some dumb shit to Walter, but I think I can get him onboard too, it's just Aaliyah I worry about." With another swig of the beer, he let himself relax and fall into silence. Mirah gave the man a once over, looking at his terribly bruised and battered skin. He hadn't sustained any severe singular injuries from Baxter, but the sheer volume of injuries that covered Ajax made Mirah cringe just looking at them.

"Aaliyah is hard to be around." Mirah interjected, though even she wasn't entirely sure if it was a justification or an excuse for her own combative behaviour around the other woman on the team.

"Yeah." Ajax said softly, peeking into his bedroom to check on Walter, "But we've still got a lot of this training stuff to go, and we've barely talked as a group. No one is comparing notes on training or even talking about the world in general with each other. We're all doing this in the dark."

"We're talking about training." Mirah disagreed lightly, but Ajax's thick eyebrow raised judgingly.

"And we're both having a hard time in training and are barely making any progress at all." He threw his hands wide, which Ajax instantly regretted but committed to regardless, "Walter can control his fire now, and Aaliyah can do that weird light blue and red thing on her skin. I didn't think Aaliyah had made any progress at all, she certainly didn't tell us about it."

He made a good point, Mirah had to admit. From a pure practicality point of view, they were being stupid and insular, and it was actively going to hurt more the longer they stayed that way. There were things they really did need to address as a group that they've barely scratched upon, including the whole mystery of who their backer was and how to find that out.

"Then we need to include her. Walter too." Mirah agreed, though she provided no methodology to do so. Ajax just sighed perplexedly, though he was glad that she now agreed that it was the best course of action—albeit with no idea how to actually corral the other woman into actually wanting to be a part of their group at all.

Ajax and Mirah enjoyed their comfortable silence for a while, Ajax only having to rush in to help Walter a few times in that time. It wasn't late in the day, only being just past midday, but even Mirah was exhausted and she'd only stood still for her entire time in the Arena. Ajax was almost dead to the world, running a hand over his tired expression ever few minutes to keep himself alert at all.

"Are you going to sleep?" Mirah said suddenly, giving the large man a jolt from whatever tired fugue he'd found himself in.

"Ah, probably in a bit. I'll go sleep in the bed and hope I hear Walter retching before I end up covered in vomit." There was a moment of unnatural silence before Ajax turned to Mirah and saw her perturbed expression. Ajax quirked an eyebrow at the girl, "Well, I'm not gay, and from Walter's taste in comics and videogames, I'm pretty sure that he's not gay either. I think it'll be fine."

"Gay?" Mirah said, doing yet another doubletake, the scrunched expression deepening further, "When a man is interested in other men?" Her confusion confused Ajax who could already feel the headache of the conversation settling in and chose to pre-emptively attack it with a sip of his beer.

"Yeah, that's what gay means." He replied tentatively, "Was that not what you were thinking about?" Mirah's confusion lessened on her face, shaking her head in the negative.

"Why sleep together?" She asked, her voice returning to the stony neutrality she reverted to when she was uncomfortable or defensive. Ajax grimaced, trying to pick out what Mirah was uncomfortable with about it, but gave up and just answered resignedly.

"I don't know, it's my bed? Besides, I did sorta volunteer to take care of him for the next couple of days." Mirah, rather than a look of understanding only looked even more uncomfortable than beforehand. However, just as Ajax was going to dig deeper, there was a knock at the door that broke the atmosphere. Both Mirah and Ajax turned to stare at the door questioningly, then back to each other.

There was another, far weaker knock on the Ajax's door before the man steeled himself by downing the last of his drink and proceeded to hesitantly walked up to the door and looked through its installed peephole. Ajax recoiled, a look of surprise and light disbelief on his face before he opened the door quickly, looking out at whoever had appeared.

Mirah wasn't able to see the person from this angle, only able to look at Ajax's own reaction to get an idea of who it might be. Unconsciously, a tension built within Mirah and the slight whispers that she'd been training with for the past month started to seep into her mind, the mostly incomprehensible clamour only able to point out the next action of Ajax opening his mouth to speak one word.

"Julia?" Ajax said, the whispers in Mirah's ear echoing the movements in his throat corresponding to the sounds just moments before they properly moved.

"U– uh, hello." A meek and beautifully strange voice said from behind the doorway. "I just wanted to say–" She began, but Ajax the owner of the alien sounding voice off hastily.

"Wait, come on in before you go on." the towering man moved to the side, opening a path into the room. There was a moment of hesitance, but soon after a… figure moved into the room. Mirah had expected a woman, possibly even a particularly beautiful one, but what she hadn't expected was a literal purple blob. The blob, or Julia, noticed Mirah's stunned stare and quickly readied herself to leave the room, but Ajax closed the door behind her, blocking off her escape from the intense green gaze.

"I, uh…" She began quickly, but took a quick breath of air and continued, "I don't want to intrude or anything!" Ajax bustled past her bulky form in the entranceway, moving into the kitchen laid just to the left of the doorway, before the tiled entrance and kitchen converted to the carpeted lounge area where Mirah sat.

"Intrude?" Ajax said with an energised laugh, "Hardly. I've been wondering what happened to you! I haven't seen you at breakfast for weeks." While Julia sat on the tiled floor, her normal purple darkening with discomfort, but the large man seemed totally oblivious to it and opened his fridge with flair.

"What do you drink?" He said as he pulled a few bottle of assorted common brands of alcohol, though after a moment he sensed her discomfort, he considered her carefully and asked; "Wait, do you drink?" Somehow, despite missing the mark almost entirely, it put Julia at ease. Even if she did still feel the other woman's stare burning through her strange pseudo skin.

"Just a beer, thank you." She replied, and Ajax was all too happy to comply, pulling two beers from the fridge, one to replenish his own, and quickly gestured her into the living room and taking his seat next to the doorway of his room once again.

"Just take a seat on the couch, if you want." Ajax said easily as he popped open the cap of his beer, the oddest thing that his axe would grant him power for. Julia didn't take the couch, of course. Not only because of the woman that sat on it, looking at her with eyes that seemed to imply that Julia was going to try and attack her or something. Also, because a seat was just another surface when you are just a blob of sentient jelly.

"So, introductions!" Ajax said, totally breaking any possible atmosphere before it could form, "Mirah, this is Julia. She's the one who was being picked on by the shithead and his crew. Julia, this is Mirah, one of the people in our little collection of undefined."

"Nice to meet you, Mirah." Julia said on reflex, the only thing that gets her through any social situation nowadays. The other girl nodded in response and, though her eyes were still wary, noticeably relaxed in her presence.

"So where have you been!" Ajax said excitedly, a stark contrast to how he'd been only minutes before, and even starker in comparison to his skin which was more dark bruise than it was his regular skin-tone.

"I, uh. My team has been helping me stay out of the cafeteria for a while. They've got special permission from Chef and my trainers to take the energy jelly out of the cafeteria too." She looked at Ajax's expression, which was a mix of relief and sadness. Maybe it was sadness because she had to hide herself away in her room, but she'd already been doing that so nothing much had really changed for her.

"I see. Well, I hope you haven't had any run-ins with Baxter and his boot-lickers?" He said, and she did her best approximation of a nod in his direction, a surprisingly difficult gesture for a relatively formless blob.

"That's what I'm here about…" Julia said tentatively, "I'm really sorry you got caught up in all that! I didn't want anyone to get hurt over me–"

"This fight wasn't about you." The stony voice of Mirah rang out, slicing through Julia's words brutally. Julia felt herself wilt under the shock of the derisive words from the other girl, her purple mass slowly pulling in on itself and going a darker colour.

"Mirah!" Ajax said harshly, his voice rising ever so slightly before turning back to Julia's shrinking form, "What my tactless friend was trying to say was that once I'd gotten us involved, if became about the principle of it." Ajax smiled apologetically at Julia, then throwing a disapproving glare at Mirah.

"Yes." Mirah said afterwards, though there was a protracted silence after the simple word. After a few moments Mirah stood from her place on the couch and walked to the door of Ajax's rooms, opening it quietly. As Mirah had walked by where Julia was sitting on the floor, she could see the scarred woman's face contorting with a supreme discomfort, the scar across her cheek going from a light pink to white with tension.

"I'm going to go to bed. Good night." The woman left before either Ajax or Julia could have said another word, closing the door behind her just as quietly, leaving the remaining two inhabitants to make awkward eye contact.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to–" Julia began, but Ajax waved a hand that stopped her apology, a powerful cringe written on his face.

"It's really okay. Mirah's like a stray cat. It's impossibly difficult to get her to relax around new people, and exceptionally difficult to not make her uncomfortable even then." The Greek giant sighed deeply, running a free hand through his long hair a few times, smoothing it into a more tamed state with his fingers while taking a long drink of the cheap beer.

"Oh…" Julia said nervously, though after a moment she chuckled to herself, "kinda like me then?" A grin quickly crawled onto Ajax's face, the expression making Julia almost shiver with a secret delight.

"Well, I don't know about that. You're pretty good in comparison." They shared a little laugh, each of their voices sounding like music to the other's ears. Julia's voice sounding like the carefully orchestrated tinkling of a thousand crystals, and the hum of Ajax's deep voice made the semi-liquid state of Julia's body literally vibrate.

"I know that this might be a little bit of a hard sell after… that whole fiasco." Ajax began awkwardly, sipping on his beer again to fill the pause, "But if you get the chance to, I think Mirah needs a friend. Y'know, other than me." He looked at her with a small plea in his eyes and Julia, despite the discomfort, found herself almost entirely unable to reject the man. The same man that had popped up in one too many of her dreams as of late.

"I'll try?" She said lightly, popping the cap off her own beer bottle and extending a small tendril inside to drink the liquid, "She seemed really uncomfortable around me."

"I know, but trust me, she's a good person. She'd just hurt, and has the scars to show for it." He drew a line across his own face where the other girl's own scar had coursed through her skin roughly.

Julia was about to respond to the man, but there was a sudden groan from the other room, surprising her. In barely a second, Ajax burst into action and moments later, Julia got the lovely treat of hearing someone vomit as she sipped from her beer.

Lovely.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patrons; Bisque, Christian P., Kristof D., and Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Benjamin V.E., Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, and Thomas H.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 41: We of J

Julia really wanted to stay and talk to Ajax more. After she'd finally worked up the hutzpah to actually approach his room, the possibility she'd had swirling in her mind for the last weeks, she'd found herself almost desperate to continue to the conversation.

She couldn't though, and after only about two hours of talking about almost anything, getting comfortable with the endlessly welcoming and understanding man, she'd had to hastily make an exit. It wasn't graceful by any means, not even close, but she didn't have time to care about how it'd seemed.

She'd raced towards the elevators as fast as she could in her slowly diminishing form, pressing the button to go to the second level of accommodation. As soon as the elevator doors closed, the urge became so much worse, almost painful in comparison to the ebbing control she'd been experiencing before.

When the doors opened once again she bounced down the hallway like a runaway rubber ball, an uncomfortable mode of movement for her, but quicker than it'd be to roll like usual. As she reached the door to her team's dorm room, she pulled the keycard from an internal pocket, unlocking it and bouncing through the room and into her own tiny personal room, locking the door behind her automatically.

As soon as she was in the privacy of her room, she let the urge overcome her as her roughly spherical form lost all its structure and fell into a puddle of purple liquid on the linoleum floors, along with the embarrassing addition of a pungent smell rising from the released gas within her.

If Julia could speak in this form, she'd sigh with grand relief, what amounted to a tingling sensation coursing across her strange biology as it always did.

There was a sharp nock at her door, a worried voice travelling through the surprisingly thick wood door, especially considering their accommodation's relative squalor in comparison to what Ajax's apartment had been on the eighth floor, the single most expensive floor of the training centre.

"Jules?" The voice called, worry permeating the woman's voice. "Are you okay? Do you need to talk?" With a little effort, Julia created a small nodule on the surface of her puddle and spoke in a small voice.

"I'm fine!" She called quickly, "I just needed to, uh, you know." The explanation that Julia offered seemed to mollify the woman on the other side of the door, a relieved sigh coming through loud and clear.

"Is it okay if I come in?" The woman asked, and Julia had to think about it for a second before squeaking out a yes, then unlocking the door from the inside of the door and retreating underneath a blanket to hide her form.

A moment later, the woman slipped into the room and closed the door behind her as well. She took a breath in to begin the conversation, but immediately choked on something. A flush of pure shame rushed over Julia as she realised that she hadn't turned on the room's fan to get rid of the pungent smell. In a flash of movement, she sneaked out from underneath the blanket, able to see grimacing woman's face before Julia turned on the fan and hid herself once again.

The fan turned on, quickly removing the smell with a loud whir and a light sucking sensation as the room's air was removed and replaced in less than half a minute, then turning off and leaving the room in a dead silence.

"Wow, I really didn't believe you when you said that the smell was intense." The other woman's voice rang out in the silent room, only adding to Julia's mortification.

"Oh my God, Jamie. I am so sorry I–" Julia's tiny voice cracked with emotion, the shame converting into an uncontrollable sadness.

"Hey, hey!" Jamie said consolingly, which was odd on the girl who was just as much of a nervous wreck as Julia, "I said it was intense, not that it smelt bad. It was actually kinda nice." She finished her words with mock contemplation, striking Julia with a sudden horror.

"Jamie!" But the other girl just giggled.

"What? It's nice! If you could dilute it down, then you could probably sell it as a perfume you know." Even though Julia couldn't wear an expression anymore, Jamie could almost sense the woman's mortified expression.

"Ew, that's so gross!" Julia said, though she couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity, "That'd be like you diluting your pee and selling it." Julia peeked out a little tendril from under the blanket, creating another little nodule to use as an eye.

Jamie was a small woman, probably only just making it to five feet tall. Her fashion sense didn't help with the perception of a quiet and reserved character, the long frizzy brown hair with mousey features with large circular lenses perched on her nose. The extremely oversized hoodies, blouses and basically every other piece of clothing being a baggy mess that hung off her frame. Usually, she had some sort of bandana or a high collar that'd cover over the bottom of her face, but amongst friends she was comfortable revealing the scale-like keratin that completely covered the skin on her face underneath her nose and down her neck.

Currently, her expression was perfect, her button nose screwed up into an expression of humorous disgust. Though, before long she realised that Julia was looking at her with the little nodule, and she grinned mischievously.

"Well, you know that Miss Terra started to sell–"

"NO!" Julia yelled, doing the equivalent of covering her ears and yelling until Jamie stopped talking about the infamous Linked woman and what sexually explicit madness she was up to. Before long they were both laughing uproariously, and if Julia couldn't breathe through her pseudo-skin, she'd be wheezing without any breath to push for laughter.

"She'd so gross, right?" Jamie managed to say between giggles and Julia did her best to glare at the woman while she was also hysterically laughing.

"I still don't trust any websites you send me after the last one! I never wanted to see her change into an animal and…" Julia made a retching sound for effect, making the other girl laugh even harder.

"Oh, don't you worry! She got a copyright thing going and used a tech Linked to remove those videos from the internet for a wild amount of money." Jamie barked with laughter again, cutting off her own sentence, "Apparently she got it replaced with an ad to her own site. Only a grand for access to videos of her turning into a sexy animal! What a steal!"

They continued the hysterics for a few minutes longer, Jamie constantly reinvigorating the laughter with offhand comments about Miss Terra's pornographic exploits and the animal rights shitstorm she'd managed to start with an errant media post.

Soon enough, the giggling died down and they ended with up with a warm and companionable silence, something Julia had felt blessed that her teammates had established early on in their training somewhere in the first month or so.

"So," Jamie began, trying to fight down a smile, "how'd meeting prince charming go?" Julia stifled a squawk of outrage before speaking, trying not to give the notorious jokester any ammo.

"Good." She said flatly, the room falling into a moment of brief respite before Jamie let out a great guffaw, slapping her knee a few times as the tears of hilarity started to flow from her amused eyes.

"Oh my God, Jules! You're crushing soooo hard!"

"I am not!" Julia screeched petulantly, though she knew that it was only weakening her case. Underneath the blanket, her purple colour slowly brightened into a lighter pink-purple.

"Maybe you should try singing?" Jamie said, doing her best suave deep voice. She was imitating the words that Ajax had said before he'd left after saving her from Baxter and his crew.

"He does not sound like that." Julia corrected, only adding to Jamie's hilarity,

"Ah, I swoon." Jamie did in a much better imitation of Julia's voice, minus the sound of tinkling crystals that was so distinctive to Julia's unique tone.

"I didn't say that, either!" The pink-purple was now almost entirely purple as she desperately combatted Jamie's giggling rendition of soap-opera Ajax.

"Oh come on Julia! You've been practically melting for this guy for god-damned weeks." Jamie threw her hands wide, letting her clawed fingers show from underneath her long and baggy sleeves, "I'm glad you finally went after him though, even if you had to do it right after he had his shit kicked in by Jeremy Baxter for helping you out. Staying classy." Julia just about squawked out a retort but managed to stop herself last moment, hesitantly considering her next question.

"W– was it really that bad?" She asked, and Jamie instantly began nodding as she crossed her arms over her deceptively buxom chest.

"Oh yeah, I mean we'd catch you salivating over the thought of him in the morning. At a few points Ren was worried that you'd awakened a killer instinct and wanted to go actually eat him, rather than the other kind of eating him." Jamie winked with gratuitous innuendo, and Julia just sighed heavily, not having the energy to argue with her. Yet, little did she know that Jamie had one last bombshell to drop.

"You know we can hear you writing and singing your own songs at night, right?" Julia really did squawk at the gleefully grinning girl but wasn't able to get a word in before serious Jamie returned.

"I don't know, Jules." She shrugged lackadaisically, "It probably wasn't the best-est and most romantic-est move anyone has ever made, but that doesn't mean shit if it went well anyway." Jamie gave the little nodule peaking from the blanket a long look with a half-smile, an expression that Julia secretly loved. That half-smile was something that Julia honestly believed was the heart of Jamie's character, underneath the joking and legendary ribbings she could dish out and take like no-one else. The gentle little smile, kind and caring, was genuine above all else.

"So how did it go?" Jamie said, the half-smile cracking into a wider and grander affair. Julia sighed heavily in response, trying to tally the day's events up in her head.

"I think it went okay? It was super weird though." Jamie quirked a thin, styled eyebrow from beneath the rim of her glasses, prompting her onwards.

"I mean, he was super nice! And almost exactly like I'd imagined he'd be." Julia shifted underneath the blanket, making it rustle a little, "He was even taking care of his teammate while we were talking. The one that was crushed by, uh, Terry?" Jamie grimaced; the image of the poor kid being thrown over the Arena like a ragdoll ingrained in her mind. The entire point of what Jeremy Baxter had undoubtedly set the matches up for in the first place.

"His other teammate was in his room at the start too. Mirah, the girl who just stood still in her match. She was… weird. Skittish."

"Like you?" Jamie interjected immediately, which would have made Julia grin if she still had a mouth to grin with. Or, more accurately, could make a mouth on her form that didn't make her look like demon spawn.

"That's what I said, and that's maybe why he asked me to befriend her when she got really uncomfortable and left." Jamie screwed up her face at that, a look of dubiousness written clearly across her expression.

"What is he, her dad?" Julia giggled at that, though she didn't share the same dubiousness as her friend.

"I mean, no." She began quietly, but continued before Jamie could interject further, "But I don't think he was being weird about it. You saw the scar on her face, right?" Jamie thought about it for a moment, before nodding slightly, her expression telling Julia that she wasn't entirely sure what she was getting at.

"Yeah so? Tonnes of Linked had all sorts of gnarly scars, even I have a few." Jamie patted a specific place on her stomach where a wound had once been, an accident in training gone potentially mortally dangerous.

"But facial scars on girls?" Julia implied heavily, knowing that the other girl had grown up in a 'sheltered' life, until her Awakening and the events preceding of course. It took Jamie another second before realisation dawned and her face dipped into darker territory, grimacing heavily at her own misunderstanding.

"Oh. Yeah, that'd do it." Julia giggled, despite the implied subject matter. The sound, almost reminiscent of a windchime in some ways, pulled Jamie from the moment of embarrassing misunderstanding.

"Well, I mean, more friends can't hurt right? And if you spend time with prince charming because of her, then it's a win-win!" Jamie said, changing tacts with a wry grin.

"Yeah. I don't really know much about her though, just that Ajax is having a really hard time putting together his team." Jamie shrugged flippantly.

"Hey, you came in late, so you didn't get the angst-fest that was our first few weeks of training. The next month after that was cake in comparison. God, angsty Juney, can you imagine?" Jamie and Julia laughed at the memory and concept of their sweet and excitable teammate being angsty—so unlike the personality that had begun to show through after Julia had entered the fold as the team's fourth.

"Plus," Julia continued the sentiment, "we had the power of 'J' names to bond us. I think they only have two 'A' names, so they aren't as powerful!" Jamie cackled with laughter but stopped suddenly with a shocked expression.

"Wait, what about Ren?"

The two girls sat in stunned silence for a moment, a moment of dawning horror before Jamie yelled out with a surprisingly powerful voice.

"Ren!" There was a moment of pause before they could hear a door slam open from one of the other four in the main area, then the door of Julia's bedroom bursting open to reveal a frazzled looking Asian man, with an athletic frame clad in skin-tight exercise clothing. He looked from the two inhabitants worriedly, his 'naturally' green hair swishing from side to side with the sound of grass in the wind.

"What? What's wrong?" He said in a slightly accented tone, looking towards his summoner. Jamie stood from her spot on the ground and walking over to the considerably taller man and reaching up to his shoulders, standing on her tippy-toes to manage the feat. With a deadly serious gaze Jamie began to speak.

"Ren Ikari, We of the order of 'J' invite you to receive an honorary 'J' name and be inducted into our ranks. Do you accept?" Ren's face warped wildly as he spontaneously developed an aneurysm.

"Wait, what?" He asked, but Jamie only nodded as if he'd accepted.

"You have made the right choice. We grant you the name of 'Jen'!" Julia couldn't stop herself anymore, the loudest laugh she'd ever produced bellowing out of the small little nodule she'd formed, quickly breaking Jamie's almost ironclad composure, leaving the newly dubbed Jen with a look of total bewilderment.

"What?" He said, totally lost, only making the two girls laugh harder.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 42: Threads

Mirah's hands snapped out at a consistent speed, her mind whirring as the whispers echoed in her mind with a structured haste. Each press of a button was quick and refined, something she'd trained extensively over the past weeks to get to this point.

Each button press came only mere moments after it begun glowing, signalling that it was ready to be pressed. Mirah had learned to ignore the physical stimuli and focus more on the whispers in her mind, refining the incomprehensible mess of sounds into something more palatable, cutting the excess that she didn't care for and instead reframing the entire world to simply be the array of buttons.

With a final button push, the array of buttons mellowed to a congratulatory gold. In the centre of the board, there sat a new number, her new personal best average reaction time.

'76ms.'

Mirah looked at the number, sitting just above the other numbers that it displayed. The average growth over her training sessions, some other metrics that Mirah paid little attention to, and a final number.

'Goal: 50ms.'

She stared at the number that had seemed so impossibly fast not so long ago, her best times not even coming close on an individual reaction, let alone her best average. The number was only so far away now, so tantalisingly close that she could swear that she could feel it on the tips of her fingers.

However, it wasn't speed that held her back now, even if she didn't personally have amazingly fast reaction speed without the use of her link. The bottleneck was how quickly the whispers would come to her, the words not reaching her mind fast enough for her to truly react.

Mirah sighed, one of the only expressions she'd become comfortable using with any regularity. She grabbed a towel that Ajax had recommend she use and towelled herself off briefly, the surprisingly intense workout not actually producing all that much sweat. Linked, outside of special cases, quickly became obscenely proficient at handling physical stressors, their biology having shifted into a truly superhuman state on average.

Mirah's mind was solely dedicated on beating that time, rigidly powering forward toward the goal that Willem had set her however many weeks ago. She had made progress, though nothing like Walter or Aaliyah had. She was only so much better at reacting to and focusing the whispering voices now, the telekinetic mystery of her link going almost entirely ignored for the moment.

She walked out into the main Gym, away from the precognitive test board to let her recalibrate. It was a ritual of hers to walk around the track one time before returning to training, giving her time to think and recentre herself, almost a form of meditation that William had taught her on and off between handling Aaliyah's own training.

As it was the middle of the day, she could feel a severe rush of air as a burred form passed by her, pushing through the air with enough speed to turn the bend and begin to return around the track before she even looked up. Historically, Mirah had taken little to no interest in the links of the other trainees, but the matches had changed her mind of the topic.

She watched the blurred form reach the beginning line of the track, abruptly cancelling out of their superspeed state and stumbling over their own feet, the intense speed leaving them and making them fall directly onto their face and skidding on the running track.

Mirah searched around the room, seeing a few familiar faces of people who'd been around when she'd entered the Gym in the morning, some of them doing very link specific training, like one man who was doing his best to levitate unsteadily above the ground with a great deal of weight hanging off of his body.

Not many of the people she could see training had a link as esoteric as hers or Ajax's, but some were certainly more impressive. A man with a body that looked almost alien with how defined his musculature was, totally defying the human biological standard. Many links that manifested so physically were considered soft morphs, though most of them didn't change to the degree of Julia, the girl that Mirah had met the night before.

Suddenly, Mirah's observations were interrupted by a massively overweight man approaching, a look of worry almost engraved into the copious amounts of fat the man had hanging off of his form.

"Excuse me!" He called, waving a hand at her, though Mirah barely reacted to the man and continued to walk despite being hailed. The man drew closer despite the lack of a reply, keeping a relative distance and facing her while walking beside her.

"You're Walter's teammate? Mirah, right?" He said hastily, his words infused with an almost desperate fervour. She looked to the man dubiously, actually perturbed at just how overweight the man was in comparison to the regular Linked. Her opponent in the Arena had been an outlier and he'd only been a little chubby in comparison to the morbidly overweight man.

"Yes." She replied guardedly, but the man didn't even seem to notice her suspicion.

"Is he okay? I was watching the match and he got really badly hurt and I can't get a hold of him." The man paced beside Mirah for a moment, before being hit with a sudden realisation, "I'm Richard, by the way. A friend of his."

Mirah frowned lightly, though it was barely visible on her stony features. She hadn't known that Walter even had friends outside of the team. She looked over the man a few times before reply quietly.

"Walter is fine. He was healed by a man named Tom and Ajax is taking care of him." The sigh of relief from Richard was so loud that it made Mirah jump in surprise, even pulling the attention of a few other nearby trainees. Richard's face emblazoned itself with a wide grin of relief, a surprisingly handsome expression on the man.

"Oh man, I'm so glad." He brushed his nervously sweaty hands across his shirt, stretching across the great expanse of his bulk, "Tom is great at fixing bones, so his arm'll be just fine. Hopefully he's okay with Ajax taking care of him." Mirah furrowed her brow at the man.

"Why would he not?" She said, her voice still clipped with suspicion. Now that Richard wasn't filled with anxiousness, he could actually recognise the tone in her voice, wary and defensive.

"I mean, Ajax said something to him a while ago that hurt Walter pretty bad," Richard shrugged, his bulk shifting easily under his shirt, "I don't think Walter's too man though, he still talked about the just all the time." Mirah tried to comprehend the strange dynamic that Richard was trying to elucidate for her, but she just found it needlessly complex.

Richard looked at her subtly, managing to glean Mirah's thoughts off her remarkable poker face, "Sometimes it's just not that simple to do, I guess. Walter might not have gone out of his way to approach Ajax, but Ajax hasn't really done it either. Probably won't matter after this though."

"Why?" Mirah asked quietly, allowing a little of her own curiosity show itself cautiously.

"Because they're stuck in a room with each other," Richard grinned widely, "not much stays unaired when you're so close to each other all the time. It's the only upside to being in a dorm over the fancy-pants floor eight apartments you've got." Mirah struggled to disagree with the man's point, not that she'd have argued with him regardless. In fact, it made a lot of sense to her. The only time that she had felt that they were making significant progress as a group was when they had been directly working together, in each other's company instead of on the other sides of a training room.

"I see." She said after a moment. Richard looked at her oddly after the response, a mixture of curiosity and amusement.

"What?" She asked, challenging the expression, but the man just chuckled lightly.

"Nothing important. You're just really short with words, it's interesting." Mirah didn't know whether she was supposed to take offense, but she wasn't given very long to think about it before he continued the thought. "I'm not the same, you see. I could just about speak to a brick wall and have a good conversation with myself about nothing interesting. So many people are guarded around here, and it always begins with a few words before you have to break down the walls that stop them from truly having an honest conversation."

Mirah realised that she had unknowingly began walking a second circuit around the track, the sudden conversation making the mindless walking pass by much quicker than it normally did when she was within her own company.

"I do not have walls." Mirah said calmly, though the man beside her almost laughed with the hideously untrue statement.

"We all have walls. We all have words that wound us and questions that pain us to answer." Mirah considered for a moment, identifying what the man considered a wall in herself. She hadn't understood the metaphor, but now that it'd been explained to her it made sense. She did have walls, quite a few of them in fact.

"I see." She repeated again, making the conversation fall into a poignant silence. This was where so many conversations had died for Mirah, in this silence. Ajax was one of the only people to be able to survive in it, but Walter shrivelled and died in the silence and clipped answers, and Aaliyah would barely do much more than ask a single question or state something at her and end the conversation after the minimum possible contact.

"You are overweight." She said impulsively, the words bursting forth from her chest with barely a moment of consideration. The other man seemed surprised for a moment, but he quickly caught onto what she was getting at.

"Yup, right I am." He lifted his arms and looked down at himself, the motion accentuating the layers upon layers of fat around his neck. "Wasn't always like this, mind, but when your link relies on having a tonne of fat on ya, you have to concede looks for utility." He grinned at Mirah as he patted his large stomach heartily.

"What about yourself, anything weird you get with your link?"

"Whispers in my mind." The large main raised a hefty eyebrow at the smaller woman, making a small noise of acknowledgement.

"That's definitely something." She nodded.

"They tell me about the future." The man let out a resonant chuckle, smiling with an easy that reminded Mirah of Ajax's warm company.

"At least they're paying rent to stick around." Mirah might not know what rent meant, but she got the idea.

"They are too slow now. I'm trying to know things quicker, but they speak lazily." The sentence came out awkwardly. Most of the time, Mirah could hide her lack of vocabulary behind short, clipped sentences of considered words, but trying to explain such an esoteric issue to someone other than her was a particularly telling task.

"That's a bummer," the man responded, glossing over the strangely worded sentence, "don't you have that telekinesis thing too? Walter said something about it when reading comics one time…" He trailed off thoughtfully, and Mirah just nodded.

"I grab onto a thread and pull." Richard rubbed his hands at his sides for a while before returning with a response.

"Can ya see the thread?" Mirah shook her head, "Then how do you know there even is a thread?"

Mirah stopped walking.

A thread? Where had that come from? The relatively mundane sentence sent Mirah spiralling into a sudden existential whirlwind. Had she ever even told anyone that she'd thought of them as threads, despite only hearing the whispers and pulling on an idea.

Without prompting a new, gentle noise began rushing in her ears, more than the whispers that told her of the future. There was a rushing river, then the light taps of an ant's leg, the grinding of the earth against earth, dirt against dirt. Each successive moment pulled her deeper, the sounds definite and distinct, despite their obscurity, but the sounds weren't the end.

Her mind pulled away from it all, her vision going dark and ears going silent, ignoring the sight that lied to her and the sounds that were too slow.

In the darkness she could see it all, the whole world in motion.

The golden threads branched like a tree, each willowy twig of it reached outwards, towards the incomprehensible infinity that Mirah's mind could never possibly comprehend. She looked down towards her feet and saw hundreds of threads originating from her, splitting from one line into tens, into hundreds, into thousands, and further into numbers too high for anyone to possibly count or understand.

She reached a hand and tapped one of the threads, feeling at each of the lines. Each of them were solid and immovable, inviolate. However, they were only one. Mirah opened her mind further, diminishing the breadth at which she saw that one spread and truly seeing for the first time.

Hundreds of sprawling trees of threads appeared around her, shifting and changing with every passing moment. As she glanced over the individual threads, flashes of sound, of movement, of tastes, and of feelings assailed her mind. The pain of understanding crushed against her mind, as if her head were within a vice.

In moments, she pulled her perception close, diminishing the tree beneath her feet and accentuating those that existed around her, the threads all glowing gold in their distinct ways. She immediately limited her perception of even those maps of threads further, pulling them in to where she could only perceive each individual thread branching three times.

Even as she did so, the ever-shifting nature of the threads warped her mind forcing her to choose, to focus intently. She could not focus on them all, an impossible task, but merely one is possible. Barely.

She felt at each of the threads, finding them looser than those that laid under her own feet, yet some were more difficult to touch than others. But one stood out to her, one that melded with another tree altogether.

Absentmindedly, Mirah pulled on the inviolable threads, intertwining them sacrilegiously.

With a sudden shock, Mirah's mind was pulled from the branching, intertwining threads back into her own realm. She stared as two men bumped into each other, the larger man accidentally pushing the other to the ground. The smaller man pushed up against a machine that activated with a bang, releasing a weight that fell to the ground with a quaking thud.

Richard looked between the strange string of coincidences and back to Mirah's enraptured expression before noticing a small spot of red leaking into her green eyes as the surface of her eyes burned with a spider web of golden lines.

"I see them." She said, before the red spot in her eyes grew to cover much of it, leaking down her face in tears of blood. Richard yelled with surprise when Mirah's legs buckled, quickly grabbing for the girl's body before she could fall to the floor.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Kreiverin, Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 43: Just Maybe

Aaliyah woke in a cold sweat to a series of loud banging at her door.

"Aaliyah!" Her name was called out with the distinctive bellow of Ajax's voice, his voice a uniquely powerful one, capable of travelling further than any of the others in the team.

She briefly considered not answering the door, before thinking better of it. She might want to distance herself from the rest of the team as much as she could, putting their budding idealism at an arm's length, but ignoring Ajax outright would be about as disastrous as you could get when it came to committing social suicide within a group.

She wearily rolled out of her bed, walking through her lounge and opened the door, eyes bleary.

"What's happen–" She began, but before she could finish, a pair of powerful hands grabbed at her shoulders and began to pull her out of her own room and down the hallway. Aaliyah yelped in surprise as the man puller her along, even letting some of the indignation and surprise colour her with a warning red. She tried to pull away, but Ajax was too strong for her to break his grip fast enough before she was pulled into his room, door clicking closed behind them.

She looked up at the man, ready to lambast him with any number of insults and anger, but when she saw the usually unflappably smiling man 's expression of pure exhaustion and worry, it stopped her dead.

The man took a moment to sigh, and then gestured to his living room, which was a mess of cloths, buckets, cleaning supplies, over the counter medicines and more. Not to mention Mirah laying down on the couch panting heavily looking as if she'd caught a terrible fever as well as a thousand spent tissues soaked with blood that was just now seeping from her nose and eyes once again.

"Help." Ajax said simply, his voice a defeated shell of the man he usually was. It wasn't a command, but almost a plea, one that made Aaliyah almost viscerally uncomfortable. As she stood in the entranceway of Ajax's apartment, standing next to a man who looked like he was aging before her very eyes and a woman that was seeping blood from her eyes, nose, and mouth, Aaliyah was stuck with no choice.

With a low growl she walked forwards to the restless woman on the couch, giving an eye to all the things that Ajax was doing to try and get her comfortable.

"Have you given her–" Aaliyah began, but saw Mirah's gut lurch and her throat bulge. In a moment of heightened senses, she grabbed the nearby bucket which Mirah promptly expelled the contents of her stomach into. "Well, I'll assume that whatever you gave her just came back up."

Ajax chuckled dryly, totally lacking any humour, but was again interrupted by another retching sound coming from his bedroom. Ajax raced into that his room and the sound of splattering sick was disturbing, managing to scratch against Aaliyah's composure like nails on a chalkboard.

Moments later, Ajax walked out of the room with the bucket a moment later, looking to Aaliyah and holding out a hand for her own with such a distillation of exhaustion that it even made her feel tired.

"Have you called Tracker or Willem yet?" She called out form the loungeroom, making Mirah groan with the volume, though she ignored it for the moment.

"Not yet, Mirah just came in half an hour ago. You might want to, though, there's blood in her bucket." Aaliyah sighed frustratedly, the strange panic of the situation already wearing on her, memories of the past she'd tried so hard to repress pulling at her conscious.

"On it." She called, not in the mood to argue that the man should have went for Tracker instead of her as soon as Mirah had come in. Aaliyah moved quickly over to the phone that was present in each of their rooms in just the same place, picking it up and dialling the extension for Tracker's room.

She'd never tried calling any of the other rooms yet, but she'd read up on how to call the right extensions, and if Tracker were as diligent as she said she was…

"Tracker speaking." The phone had rung twice, after which it had clearly switched lines and after another ring Tracker's voice was on the other side of the phone.

"I have no idea what's going on, but Mirah is sick now too. Fever, bleeding from eyes, nose, mouth, vomiting some blood. Get here quick." Aaliyah slammed the phone back into its holder as she rushed back to Mirah's side, grabbing some of the tissues to dab at the blotches of blood around her eyes and nose, keeping her head tilted so that she couldn't choke on the blood or that none of it leaked down the back of her throat.

Quickly Aaliyah developed a process the best she could, trying to ease as much of Mirah's discomfort as she could. As she did so, she caught herself slipping into the mindset she'd abandoned so long ago, one that she'd assumed for her sister after their mother had abandoned them. It almost made her angry that it has to be Mirah of all people to bring up those emotions again, just salt in the wound to her discomfort around the woman.

Only a minute or so after Aaliyah had made the phone call, there was a click from the door behind her, and Tracker strode into the room as professionally attired as ever.

"I don't know what happened to her–"

"Don't worry, I quickly called around and figured it out." Tracker interrupted, pulling out a blister package strip of pills, each of the pills a clear bead of blue and green within them. She quickly popped one of the pills from the package and snatched a glass of half drunken water from the kitchen table. In moments, the woman was crouching at Mirah's side, sitting her up to then forcing the pills down Mirah's throat with practiced ease.

Mirah swallowed the pill and water painfully, and looked as if she were going to reject the addition along with what was left of the rest of her stomach contents. Bothe Tracker and Aaliyah waited for a pregnant moment before the scarred woman's face eased ever so slightly, having left the moment of danger.

"Okay." Tracker sighed with relief, wiping at her forehead idly before turning to Aaliyah and holding up the blister package. "Once every three hours till they're gone." She commanded, and Aaliyah nodded hesitantly.

"You know what happened?" She asked quickly as Tracker got back up and walked into the kitchen area.

"Mirah managed to find a new aspect, I think." Tracker replied as she rummaged through the cupboards to find a cup of her own and filling it with water.

"A new aspect? Isn't that really rare?" Tracker shrugged as she downed the cup of water, then doing the same with a second cup.

"Not in undefined classified Linked. In fact, it's almost one to one. Not to mention that she only just had a Remembrance a month ago." Tracker let the glass cup clink against the stone countertop as she placed it down. She sighed weightily, leaning against the bench while facing Aaliyah, "We don't know what triggered her finding the new aspect, or what the aspect is, but I'd say it'll be a weird one."

"So she'll be fine?" Aaliyah asked, letting out a little more worry than she'd have liked in her voice, though Tracker pointedly ignored it.

"She'll be fine, yes, though she'll have a rough time of it in the next few hours. She's effectively got a severe form of link burnout, like what hypercognitives get if they push their brain really hard. Hence why I have a strip of those pills." Aaliyah nodded briefly before looking back at Mirah's slowly easing face, the tightness in her muscles slowly loosening as the drug did whatever it did.

"The pain and the fever will ease in the next hour, but she'll be trying to throw up for a few more yet, and then after that she might wake up. When she wakes up, make sure she drinks a lot and I'll get Chef to send up some food for her if you give him a call."

Aaliyah nodded again, letting the cloud of grey cover her as she slowly took care of Mirah. After that, she heard Tracker and Ajax talking to each other, though their voices were warped and distorted to Aaliyah, her mind focusing its entire attention on the girl she had come to despise.

The hours passed just like Tracker had said they would, almost to the minute, but the feeling of the cloud bearing down on her shoulders and her mind never went away. If Aaliyah had been of any sane mind, then she'd have noticed that grey, stormy colour that had begun to propagate across her skin, though she didn't.

She wouldn't be experiencing the depths of her own emotions if she could.

Aaliyah reached out a hand and brushed gently at Mirah's hair, stroking her hand through the short brown mess of curls. Not too long ago they had been a haphazardly cut to the sides of her head, focused entirely on practicality rather than any looks, yet now Aaliyah could see the beginning of the beautiful hair that Mirah could grow.

She slowly traced her fingers down Mirah's face, finally arriving at the scar that was featured so prominently. That was the thing that broke something deeper inside Aaliyah than she'd thought was possible anymore.

Aaliyah was unable to stop herself from seeing the face of her twin sister overlap with Mirah's, the scar almost glowing with the harsh contrast. Her sister had looked nothing like Mirah, not even close to the same features, but she had been beautiful just like Mirah. And she had the same eyes as Mirah.

Not the same colour, but the same shattered, broken eyes that Aaliyah now secretly wore. Aaliyah's hand shook as she traced the scar, her finger almost feeling as if it were being cut by the viscousness of the tear in the other girl's flesh, the small ridges of the scar ever so prominent against her fingertip.

"Halina." She whispered, almost like it was a lullaby. The ghost of her sister's face disappeared from within her mind as she spoke the name, leaving only Mirah's behind, but the tears were already rolling down her cheeks. Each one of the droplets falling down the same path over and over, dripping down her face and nose, prompting her to wipe at them with the sleeve of her long-sleeved t-shirt.

Her sister had been the first to wear those eyes, though Mirah had probably wore them even earlier than that. The partying and drugs had been a way to escape from her life, from what she knew her father was, and the terrible rage she felt towards her mother. Aaliyah had felt the same but she couldn't make herself follow in her sister's footsteps, some small part of her resistant to the idea.

She'd tried to help her so many times. Halina had asked for that help just as many more, but it only ended in her eyes growing a little duller, a little more dead behind them.

She could never possibly count the times that she'd helped her sister recover from a bender, just as she was doing for Mirah now. She'd tried to help her quit many times, but the withdrawals always proved stronger, eating away at any semblance of what had once been her twin sister.

And then she had died, choking on her own vomit.

Their father had never known. They'd been so terrified that he'd find out about Halina's drug use that they'd hidden it from him entirely, an easy task when he was always so caught up in conducting evil as Monarch.

He'd found out on the day that she died. And he'd also found out that the drug she'd used, that had killed her, was the very same drug that he'd proliferated throughout Melbourne for years.

He'd killed her.

And they both knew it.

Maybe that was why he let himself fall to her punches so easily, willing to be hit and wailed upon. Maybe that was why he let himself be tied up and thrown into their basement, never to see the light of day again. Maybe that was why, as she crushed his empire and all of his partners along with, his face was so dead as she recited it all to him every night, not even screaming as she told him the fate of everything he'd done.

Maybe that was why it was so easy to slit his throat and leave his corpse to rot, not even doing so much as beg, leaving Aaliyah to run away in the night—hoping to never be found by those that wanted her dead for her crimes.

And maybe that was why she was here, at this training centre and in this team. This was the last lifeline that she had to cling to, the only one that could bring her out of the dark recesses of Melbourne and into the light once again, maybe even making it possible for her to move somewhere nicer. New Zealand, with their seven Maori Brothers, protecting their country from any who might threaten their people.

But she looked down at the girl that so resembled her sister, taking care of her like she had so many times before, she felt that uncomfortable pull. The pull of people, of friendship and family, of a future apart form one that wholly considered only her.

A future where she discarded every misgiving she had and fell into lockstep with the others of her group, knowing better than all of them the darkest pits they could be thrown into. And as soon as she considered the possibility, the cracks in the veneer she'd created for herself, so good that even she'd believed in it, started to spiderweb across the entire structure.

The bright light shone through the cracks, filling her with an unease so potent that it almost floored her for a moment before she began to adjust to the light of hope that began to shine through with a greater intensity. She'd bottled it up for so long, but now it was out of the bag again. It might only be small, relative to the monolithic doubt and fear she possessed, but it was enough to notice and to feel.

And with it, maybe…

Just maybe.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 44: Shared

She found herself in a strange and restless world, full of places and people she didn't know and couldn't understand.

They spoke, but her mind couldn't parse what they were saying, but soon the definition of the dream grew clearer. The world within her mind became that of crystal clarity. There was the room she's shared with them for her entirely life, the walls covered in memorabilia that had changed ever few months as a child. From boy bands to girl bands, to art and history, anything and everything that had excited them as children had been up on those walls. It'd been an ever-shifting mosaic, a display of just how their minds had changed over the decade since the first thing was stuck to that wall.

Now, those walls surrounded her and them. Their place of solitude was broken by another painful retch.

"It's okay." She felt herself whisper, even though she hadn't said a word. She rubbed their back, another woman with blond hair and hazel eyes. As she rubbed the other woman's back, she felt a moment of severe disorientation, a distinct separation from reality and self that warped her very perception.

She was Aaliyah Flinn, taking care of her sister as she tried to quit heroin for the fourth time.

"I sure don't feel alright." Her sister–no, Aaliyah's sister responded between retches. Aaliyah's brow creased with worry, a roiling fear inside of her gut blooming into full flower.

"Please let me call someone, we can get you medicines to help you with–" Aaliyah said, her voice rapid fire, but she was cut off with an angry hiss.

"No! No help, no drugs, no Dad!" Aaliyah recoiled slightly, the hurt and helplessness swirling deep within.

"Halina I–"

"No!" Her sister said, almost screaming the words out with an irrational anger. She was like a wounded animal, staring at its attacker, getting ready to take it down before it died. Aaliyah swallowed down the hundred words she'd wanted to say, that she'd even prepared for this exact situation. She'd wanted to guide her towards help, but she was left with babysitting her sister through the pain and anguish every few months, when she got the idea that she was going to go cold turkey.

And it continued, and continued, and then one day she had died there, in that exact position. Her cold and lifeless body had been untouched by Aaliyah for hours before she'd finally begun to wail and cry, like the little girl that she'd been at the time.

And when the predator had walked into the room, she'd stared at him like a wounded animal, just as her sister had for far too many years. Except, Aaliyah wouldn't stop at being the wounded animal, no.

She'd become the predator itself if she had to.





Mirah felt her body lurch forward, pulling against the resistance of the sleep that had overtaken her.

The awakening was terrible, with her mouth full of dry horribleness covering her tongue, a raw throat with the distinctive aftertaste of bile, a rampant exhaustion radiating from her very bones, and a headache so severe that she could barely open her eyes to the dimness of the room she was in.

It took a few minutes of struggle for the girl to open one of her eyes enough to see through her own lashes, the crusty residue of what could only be blood cracking and shifting as she opened them, as if she were asleep for centuries and stone and debris had covered over her eye.

Mirah hadn't known what to expect when she did. Maybe a bed bay of some sort, her brain unable to properly process any of the stimulus she was receiving. But when she'd opened her singular eye, the sight of Aaliyah's sleeping form instantly made both eyes snap open, heedless of her exhaustion.

She realised that she was in one of the team's rooms—Ajax's, from the small collection of beer cans that he had lined up on the kitchen bench—and was being taken care of by Aaliyah. The other girl was sleeping, in a position that hardly looked comfortable. She was sitting on the floor, one of the large pillows placed underneath her for comfort, with one of her elbows placed against the coffee table and her head resting against her hand precariously. Across her pale skin danced grey blotches of colour, drowning out most of what usually existed on her skin.

Aaliyah's sleeping form gave Mirah a moment of conflict, stuck in the middle of wariness and curiosity. She'd never seen Aaliyah with any other expression than one of the masks she'd worn or in one of the rare genuine expressions that only seeped out when emotions ran too high. But right now, she wore a peaceful expression, one that ironically showed Mirah more about the other girl than she'd grasped from her in weeks of training.

Ajax had told Mirah that she needed to make good with Aaliyah, and Mirah agreed. It would be the best for the team, for their continued survival. But Mirah didn't like her. Her very existence grated on Mirah's nerves, just like she expected that she did on Aaliyah's.

They were separate beings, oil and water, direct counters to one another. Mirah logically knew that it was the best choice to simply include the other girl in whatever Ajax had begun to build with her and, if everything went right, Walter too. But that was easier said than done.

Mirah felt, deep down, that opening the door for Aaliyah was like letting a fox into the henhouse. She was a predator, and she reeked it from every pore in her body, even if she wore the sheep's clothing spectacularly. Ajax and Walter couldn't see the difference, they hadn't ever had to learn the difference. She found herself being the only stopgap between Aaliyah and whatever she'd do to the team if she were allowed.

Mirah coughed lightly, trying to clear her throat of the phlegm that was impeding her breaths, but that little cough quickly turned into another, and then into a gut turning retch. As she felt her body trying to desperately expel the gunk, she saw a quick flash of movement out of the corner of her eye and as the miscellaneous material left her body it was caught in a bucket held by Aaliyah's hand.

It took Mirah a few moments, and then a few more after to catch her breath as her muscles clenched uselessly after the gunk had been expelled.

"Feeling better?" Aaliyah's sleepy voice called out, only half cognizant and lacking any of the usual barbs. Mirah nodded shakily before she leaned herself back down onto the couch, one that thankfully made a decent bed. She gave herself a moment to breathe before she said anything out loud.

"Who is she?"

The question froze the sleepy atmosphere, but vocalising it only made the memories come back stronger. Mirah had seen them, experienced those emotions and moments alongside her. For just a moment, she had been Aaliyah, and she'd had her sister.

"Halina was your sister." She answered her own question quietly, before leaning her head to the side on the pillow she'd been supplied looking at Aaliyah's face. Aaliyah's expression was one of pure shock, the ravine that Mirah's words had created was deep enough to crack all the way through any mask she could've worn, and just lead directly to who she really was beneath.

"W-what?" Aaliyah said, but Mirah barely heard the words.

"You're Aaliyah Flinn, your sister was Halina Flinn." Mirah said, as if in a trance, "Your father was the Monarch, wasn't he?"

Aaliyah swallowed against the sudden panic, a complete bewilderment as to what was happening in front of her eyes. Mirah was pulling information from nowhere, things that few ever knew. Her sister's existence was almost entirely secret, as was her own until…

"You were the Monarch too. You killed your father." Mirah's green eyes pulled Aaliyah in like a blackhole, her mind caught on the edge of the event horizon for an eternal moment. Yet Mirah's expression was filled with a strange understanding, something so alien to Aaliyah.

The movement was gentle, laboured even, but as Mirah wrapped her arms around Aaliyah's shaken form, Aaliyah felt an undeniable warmth—soothing and mollifying at its basest form. It was jarring for her, the warmth that came from Mirah's arms weakly circling around her body, something that she hadn't been given in an uncountable period of time.

Consolation.

"You did the right thing."

Mirah's words were spoken in that same was as they always were. Totally bereft of any subtext or intrigue and focused entirely on their exact meaning. However, unlike before, there were emotions attached to them, heavy and serious.

"How?" Aaliyah asked, even a single word was too much for her voice to handle, cracking with a rush of emotion as she unconsciously raised her arms to return the hug.

"I saw your dream. I was you, for a moment."

Aaliyah couldn't possibly open her mouth again, fearing that the next word would come with a sob. Try as she might, couldn't hold back the tears within her eyes, or the leaps that she felt in her chest as she bit down the sob that so desperately wanted to be released.

"You stopped your father from hurting anyone else." Mirah said slowly, calmly, methodically. Aaliyah wanted so desperately to deny it, to tell the truth, to tell her that she was a monster, a predator. Because she was. There were no aspirations to help others, it was pure and simple revenge in its most horrible form.

"How many did you save?" Mirah whispered into her ear, her breath making the long blonde hair flutter ever so slightly. "And you sacrificed everything to do it."

Aaliyah felt her heart jump into her chest as Mirah pulled away, looking deep into her hazel eyes with her rapturous jade green ones. Aaliyah wanted to hide away her face, to wipe it clean of the tears that had fallen down her face, ruining the perception of her power. But Mirah felt all seeing in that moment, as if there was nothing that could escape those green eyes of hers, and Aaliyah had begun to believe it.

"Are you not a Hero?"

"How could I be a Hero?" Aaliyah managed to say finally, the words coming out sounding strained and raw, yet Mirah's expression didn't do some much as flinch.

"Tracker told me something when I'd asked her about being a Hero." Mirah began after a moment of pause, "She asked me about my past, and the little girl I'd watched being raped by a Linked. She asked me; 'If you could go back, would you not save that girl?'" Mirah's eyes were clear, uncluttered by complication or moralistic arguments. Her view was not binary, but it also didn't see the entire words in a never-ending spectrum of grey like Aaliyah did.

Like everyone seemed to. Everyone watched the world, the horrors within it, and the powerful perpetrators of those horrors, and they simply saw them as grey. They didn't allow for black and whites, because it was too easy to be burned by it. It was easier to see everything as grey so that they could shrug and say, 'What did you expect?' when something truly bad happens.

But Mirah didn't. She saw the full spectrum, delineating them within her mind more precisely and with more veracity than Aaliyah had ever offered to her own worldview.

"If you could go back, would you not save your sister? Would you not stop your father? Would you let it all die?" Mirah shook her head, "You wouldn't. You would fix it."

"How could you be so sure?" Aaliyah said, trying to summon the barbs that she so often wore as armour, but Mirah saw past it.

"Because you aren't like that."

Aaliyah left, walking out of the room and towards her own with fevered strides. Within moments of finding the comforts of her room, she cried.

Mirah's words had a way of being cutting, like a straight edge razor against skin. They were so sharp by their nature that they could part your flesh and, before you felt a thing, they'd clink against your bones, the very structure of your being.

Aaliyah, in any other mindset, would be trying to pick apart how Mirah had gotten this information and how she knew where to press to make it hurt like nothing else. Mirah, the most emotionally oblivious person of the entire group was also the one gifted with the ability to say a few sentences and make Aaliyah question her entire being, and what she was doing.

To hell with the safety and the security. To hell with running from it all forever. Damn her enemies, ones she'd created doing something she knew had to happen, for the sake of her sister. Fuck them all.

Aaliyah, in a moment of pure clarity with her heat cut wide open, realised that she didn't want to live in this world anymore. Where there was nothing but pain and suffering, with every person being born with an inbuilt understanding that the world was going to die, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

No. No more excuses or easy outs. Aaliyah got up from her spot on the floor, walking over to her set of drawers. She slid open the bottom drawer to reveal a hefty sports bag that contained everything that she could possibly need to live.

She grabbed the bag, sliding the bottom drawer closed and instead opening the top one, the easiest to reach. She unzipped the bag, then upended it, spilling all of its contents into the drawer, and throwing the now empty bag to the side, beginning to organise the mess of clothing, supplies and anything else.

After a few moments, she stood back from the drawer, witnessing its neatly organised interior quietly. It was done. For the first time in years, she'd filled a drawer with her things. Aaliyah slid the drawer closed, then turned to her bed and fell into it.

Sleep came easy that night.


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 45: Connected

"Man, I'm really sorry about, y'know…" Ajax said as he rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, his hair up in a bun mostly for the convenience and the peace of mind that his long, brown hair wouldn't end up falling in the copious amounts of vomit that he'd delt with in the past few days.

Walter, who'd been awake for a day or so now, was just about as awkward as Ajax was with the apology. With his recovery from whatever had been done to him by the guy that'd 'reset' his arm, Walter had awoken to Ajax just being there and helping him out while he puked more than he had in his entire life.

What it was about the healing that made you so physically ill was beyond Walter, but he'd take the few days of suffering over trying to naturally heal his arm, especially the way that his opponent had mangled it.

"I mean, it's alright. It was a shitty thing to say, but I kinda overdid it a bit by not talking to you for, uh…" Walter thought for a second before realising that it'd been a full month, "a while." He completed tentatively.

The understatement made both men struggle to hold back cheeky smiles, and it was then that Walter almost felt like cursing himself out. Walter had built the conversation up in his mind as if there was a massive rift between them, and the single conversation would determine any future involvement forevermore.

Yet here they were, not two sentences into their conversation with the issue almost entirely resolved between them. Walter sat in Ajax's bed awkwardly for a moment, though Ajax was the one to break the silence.

"So Mirah apparently got Aaliyah to agree to actually being a group. I think anyway." Walter blinked heavily.

"Come again?" He asked, getting a grin out of Ajax.

"Mirah convinced Aaliyah to actually join up, proper." Ajax took a great deal of pleasure in watching the baffled expression morph rapidly on the man's face. Walter was legitimately speechless, though he managed to git his voice back after a moment of opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

"Mirah did?" He double checked. Ajax laughed heartily, giving a nod in response as he watched the comically stunned man come to terms with the laws of the universe somehow breaking before his eyes.

Mirah was the person that couldn't stand Aaliyah, and she made it just about as obvious as she could with her eternally stony expressions. For Mirah to be the one to bring Aaliyah into the fold properly was against everything he knew about the girl, and Aaliyah was just about as unlikely to have joined under anyone's request, Mirah even less so.

While they weren't exactly shouting it from the rooftops, it was becoming increasingly obvious that he and Ajax had more heroic aspirations than simply working a corporate job and raking in the cash like nothing else or working of the gangs.

While he had been avoiding Ajax, he'd noticed that Ajax and Mirah had gotten significantly closer, enough that she'd actively talk to him. She must've decided to join up with their little camp, leaving only Aaliyah left within the team. Walter had expected for her to remain the enigma of the group, to spend her time just outside their inner circle and then do a runner when she got out of training.

But now Mirah had convinced Aaliyah to join in their aspirations? He couldn't help but worry that they didn't get that they were going for a heroic thing.

"Are you sure–" He began, but Ajax cut him off with a raise of an eyebrow.

"They aren't silly, Walt. They know what we're up to, even if we aren't going to be doing anything much for a little while. I hope at least." Walter heard the unease in Ajax's voice and turned a wary eye to the man.

"You don't sound super sure about that, Ajax. Why?" Ajax sighed heavily at Walter's prying.

"I'm not liking how the Baxter's team is setting this up, man. I think this is only round one, and they're going to keep advancing our training and pull out all stops before long. They pushed our training up more than a month already, so we're going to have to learn on our feet quick-smart." Ajax leaned back in the chair he'd spent much of his time resting in the past few days, giving him ease of access to Walter as he laid there.

"I mean, at least we have some unity now, right?" Walter posed shakily, but Ajax just gave him a look, then glanced down to the arm that Walter's opponent had crushed making Walter himself wince, "You're not wrong, I guess. Like, I just figured out how control fire, I haven't even started on Water yet."

"And I haven't really gained much from my power. I'm more consistent with it by a few kilograms of force, but nothing actually significant." Ajax gave Walter an expression of wry concern before lifting his eyebrows in concession, "Mirah did just get a new aspect though, so that's new and interesting."

Walter's eyebrows shot up, letting Ajax see the little glimmer of a tactician that they'd seen in him when he'd set up their general strategies against Baxter's team.

"A new aspect, what is it?" He asked, but Ajax just grinned as if he'd stepped on an inside joke that Walter didn't understand.

"I asked and all I got out of it was that she can pull on strings now. Webs of strings, something like that. Aaliyah's been trying to get her to properly explain it, but uh," Ajax coughed lightly, "she doesn't really have the vocab to explain it?"

"God," Walter said frustratedly, "if only everyone read superhero comics as a kid. Would be so much easier, man." Ajax's chest rumbled with a chuckle, not quite agreeing but not disagreeing either. They certainly did give a particular way of discussing links, though they're all made in the US, so it's all about 'powers' there. Still stuck to the old way of thinking, Ajax guessed

"So, what do we even do now?" Walter said aimlessly, unsure of this sudden shift in his predicted future. Ajax just shrugged.

"I dunno, seems pretty clear to me, man. We have all sorts of things to follow down now, stuff that we didn't do because we weren't working together at all. Like the backer thing, we didn't even start trying to figure that out."

"But that was because Aaliyah suggested that we break into the admin building and steal that information. We can't do that!" Ajax gave the other man a sideways look.

"We can't?" Walter looked at Ajax, aghast, but he continued quickly, "Look, I'm not saying that it's legal, or that we'll even end up doing it, but Aaliyah and Mirah agreed that this was our best option ages ago. I'm not just going to throw out those opinions."

"Are you crazy? If we got caught doing that… I don't even know what they'd do!" Ajax nodded, amiably agreeing. He certainly wasn't wrong, but also, there was a risk in not doing it too.

"Well, we certainly wouldn't be getting our certification after that, and depending on when we get caught it could end up with jail time."

"See! I mean–" Ajax gave the interrupting man a disappointed look.

"C'mon, Walt. At least let me finish." Walter zipped his lips sheepishly, wilting underneath Ajax's gaze for a moment.

"But you have to acknowledge that we're at risk. Especially now that we're making this little group. We have no idea who set us up in the most expensive rooms the AASAU have to offer, we have no idea what they want from us in future, and if we don't at least try to figure out who's bankrolling our entire training process, we're almost asking for it." Ajax made strong eye contact with Walter, making sure that he understood the gravity of the situation. For the moment they've been able to get away with having their team squabbles, but with the added pressure, they were running out of time.

"Alright, I guess so. But I'm sure there's a better way, right? Like maybe we can get a hacker to–"

"With what money, Walt."

"I mean, I have some. I might be able to borrow more from my parents?" He posed tentatively, though it didn't seem to have much confidence behind it.

"So, we pay this guy, someone shady enough to break into AASAU systems, and they somehow don't run off with the money, but we don't pull up anything? All that money is gone, man."

"But if we get caught in the AASAU headquarters stealing, we get put in prison, Ajax." Ajax sighed, holding his hands up in defeat.

"I dunno, you'll have to talk to Aaliyah and figure out what we need to do. I don't know anything other than we need to do something. Whatever it is." Walter didn't quite look happy with that answer, but he couldn't exactly argue with it either.

Walter groaned frustratedly, but didn't bother to follow it up, instead deciding to settle back in Ajax's bed.

"Wanna order something in?" He posed to Ajax, who just looked to the phone by the bedside and grinned at Walter.

"Sure do."

---

"Well, well. Fuck me dead." Willem said, the use of swearing pulling the eyes of every person in the living room of Ajax's space. Ajax, who was the one that let the man into the room in the first place, balked a little. Willem had sworn a few times around them, but it was always reserved for big things.

As Ajax looked towards his couch, Mirah, Aaliyah, and Walter all sitting next to each other semi-harmoniously. Ajax chuckled a little, it kinda was a big deal.

"You all finally managed to get your act together, then? All circled around a fire, held hands, and sang kumbaya?" Ajax slipped by the stocky man who only just came up to his abdomen, taking his place on the couch, only just big enough to hold the four of them at once.

"We tried to skip that part. Is it contractual?" Aaliyah said tiredly, still recovering from a few nights of less than stellar sleep. Willem scoffed loudly before sitting down in the chair opposite the group, staring at them all intently.

"I'll let it slide for now." He responded dryly. "Maybe I should've thrown you guys in a gladiator ring sooner. Nothing like grievous injury to bond over." The group chuckled quietly at the man, though no-one added fuel to the man's fire. Willem glanced around the room with his mundane looking grey eyes, though they were piercing, nonetheless. He sighed deeply, letting his body slouch into a more comfortable position.

"Alright then, now that we've finally figured out how to act like adults, I'll treat you like one." He crossed a stubby looking leg over another, giving each and every one of the team a good hard look, "You're all in a bad spot right now." The almost happy atmosphere turned cold.

"Why?" Walter asked, though the answers were somewhat obvious. Willem ran a hand over his cleanly shaven bald head, ending with scraping his fingers through his thick brown beard.

"Ernest Baxter is sicing his lawyers on the AASAU and using them to fast track your training as much as possible." Aaliyah swore, having caught on almost immediately though the rest of the team just looked at each other awkwardly. Aaliyah sighed shortly after, opening her mouth to speak.

"Jeremy wanted to make us an example in here to boost his own rep, but now Jeremy's dad caught onto it and wants to show just how unavoidable RO's power is." The Walter gulped almost audibly, his anxiety level increasing at the sentence went on. "We just got promoted."

"Fuck." Everyone's eyes turned to Mirah, who was simply staring off into space, ignorant of the gazes resting on her.

Ajax choked down a laugh, "What she said."

The absurd line out of Mirah actually made the mood lighten a little, at least until they were capable of thinking without the intense worry that had been settling over them.

"Normally," Willem continued, a little crinkle at the sides of his eyes, "you'd get about eight to ten months to train, but you aren't even going to have half of that at this rate. To put it lightly, you're getting scammed out of training time that you're probably going to need to live. You're being set up to fail here." Just about everyone was rubbing at their weary faces, already feeling the stress of what was sure to come.

"Is there any way that we can combat that?" Aaliyah said, her voice taking command of the conversation that no one else in the group had the experience to tackle.

"Have a spare lawyer lying around?" He asked, and Aaliyah turned to look at Walter who just grimaced, not interested in putting his parents in that sort of danger. She turned back to Willem and shook her head.

"Can we represent ourselves?" She asked, her last line of hope before simply dealing with it.

"If you want to be eaten alive by a lawyer good enough to work for Russia's very own Think."

"Then what do we do?" Aaliyah said while she ran a hand through her hair and quickly organised her hair into a ponytail.

Willem looked down at his watch, something that was probably at least a few decades old, "How are we feeling about some training?"


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 46: Record

Willem sat on a stool in the private training area that the team had been training in solitarily for quite some time—close to each other, but ever so separated. The short man was elevated to Mirah's eyelevel atop the metal stool, rubbing at his trimmed but still bushy eyebrows.

"Again." He said perplexedly. Mirah grimaced in her own little display of frustration.

"I see webs of strings. They are all different. I can pull on some, others are hard to move, some feel impossible." She said, culling down her previous, far more laborious explanation.

"Alright," Willem said slowly, "so you can see the future when you touch them?"

"I can feel them, understand them." Willem hummed in the protracted silence his mind swirling with possibilities. However, his hum was interrupted by the baffled, and slightly reedy tone of Walter's voice.

"Why are you digging so hard? It seems pretty simple to me, all things considered." Willem's slate grey eyes turned on the man, eyebrows raised in admonishment.

"Simple?" Willem scoffed, "You have no idea what simple looks like, kid. If you think her link is in any way simple, then you're just deluding yourself into thinking you understand." Walter gaped slightly at the harsh words, but swallowed his instinctive response when Aaliyah elbowed him in the side. He hissed slightly, turning to look at the much taller blonde woman reproachfully.

"Shut it, short stack. You're trying to outclass the highly paid trainer in his own field." Aaliyah's tone was almost amused, her face pulled into a little sneer of its own. Walter grumbled to himself, though he might've tried to lash back if it weren't Aaliyah he'd be flailing against. She had a sharp tongue, and could think on her feet, both of those were skills that Walter lacked significantly.

Though he wouldn't quite admit to himself that he didn't want to argue with her because she was ungodly beautiful.

"Why is that different?" Mirah said, somehow more lost than anyone else, which only made the process of determining exactly what her link was even more difficult. Willem crossed his meaty arms over his just as ludicrously muscular chest, sighing deeply.

"Well, it'd effect how powerful your precognitive abilities are. In the far past we used a number rating system out of ten, but special exceptions were being made so often that it made the system almost entirely obsolete. I think the highest recorded number we got was a twenty," Willem scrunched his eyebrows then clicked his fingers in remembrance, "that's right, it was when Gigantesca appeared in Brazil and made her own miniature earthquake and walked straight out of Rio de Janerio and into the Atlantic. Though we never tried to rate Centerpoint. A fool's errand."

Mirah struggled to remember the names that were being thrown at her, even as the others in the group seemed to understand instantly. Mirah vaguely remembered Gigantesca, the four-thousand-metre-tall woman, mindlessly wandering the oceans. A terrifying display of what happens when a link goes wrong. Centrepoint, however, was more familiar, a name that had come up a few times in general conversation and in her unfortunate research surrounding Suicide.

Centerpoint was considered the most promising candidate for being the strongest Linked on Earth. The true extent of his abilities haven't ever been revealed, but those with high enough clearance within the US government and any of his former allies concede the title to him without a single thought.

The ability to control gravity, just on a scale far past any other Linked who exists. At least for now.

"Regardless of the old system we abandoned, now we just delineate into 'classes' and leave it at that." The man hopped from his stool, beckoning the group to follow him as he talked, "Your typical low-class would just be someone who can hit a little harder, run a little faster. Mid-class gets to the real meat and bones of what you consider powerful, with people capable of launching people through concrete, going supersonic, thinking with the mental power of ten people at once, and so on."

Willem stopped in a location that Mirah had become very familiar with, and nobody else by Ajax had ever bothered to come meet her in. The wide lightboard up against one of the training area's walls.

"High-class are the people at the pinnacle of that vision. They are the people capable of lifting inordinate weights, developing extremely advanced technologies in the span of my coffee break, evaporating hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of an eye." The group collectively swallowed at the sharp turn into darkness. Willem's eyes held their attentions captive as he glanced towards Mirah.

"Then there is beyond that. It technically has no name, though we just call it beyond-class, because they are exactly that."

"God-class" Walter whispered, making a grin flutter onto Willem's face.

"Some call them that yes, though don't fool yourself into thinking they can't be killed. I've seen a beyond-class die right in front of me. It was… eye opening." The team's ears perked at the man's mention of his own past. Int eh time that they'd known Willem, he'd said almost nothing about his own history or who he was before he was a trainer at the AASAU.

"Every little part of your link matters, regardless of how small. The smallest of discrepancies could mean the difference between low-class and being the strongest Linked on Earth. There is remarkably little barrier between them." Willem turned to the board and hit a few buttons in short succession, menuing through the options until he moved out of the way leaving Mirah standing in front of a glowing button.

"This is just one such assessment." Willem said, now standing off to the side as Mirah prepared herself. The others watched on curiously, only Ajax having watched Mirah's display of her prior precognitive prowess.

However, now Mirah's link was different. No whispers filled her ears like before, all clamouring to be heard over one another until she stripped the noise down to what she wanted to hear. Instead, as she closed her eyes for just a moment, she reopened them to see the dark world she'd seen not so long ago. This time Mirah was careful about limiting what she saw, the pain of what Aaliyah had explained was 'link-burn' still lingering in her mind.

The golden lengths of twine that surrounded her closed in on themselves, only letting her see a fraction of their true bulks. Instead of the thousands of little branches, she limited it to only three, something still difficult to comprehend as she looked at them.

She hadn't delved into this space since she'd passed out, in fear that she'd make her recovery worse, buy she was already learning a lot about the threads and the trees and webs that they belonged to.

There were many origination points, all tangentially connected to one another in some form. As Mirah let her mind take in those origination points, she found that not all of them were human. In fact, most of them weren't.

The members of her team and her trainer, standing around her, were the brightest webs, the most alive in comparison to the mostly static surroundings. However, in front of her there was a web that was almost as complex as the people that surrounded her.

She looked further, her mind subsuming itself within that web and each thread that branched from an inciting incident. One incident was Willem pressing against the button, the other was her doing so instead. From there, it was a severely branching thread, something that could only be determined as soon as she pressed that button.

So she did.

Immediately as her fingers reached out and pressed against the button, things changed within the web of golden lines. Mirah didn't need to touch the lines, or to pull against them, they themselves changed and flickered.

In just a moment the complexly branching paths whittled themselves down at a speed that surpassed any normal human's cognition, including Mirah's own, but she could see the line become one, uniform thing reaching into the future with branches coming off the sides that were dampened in their brightness with their lack of importance.

Her mind wandered to its first section, the numbers of the countdown appearing in her mind as they did in real time, yet as she pushed her mind forwards along the line, she could see the signal as it was sent from the small computer that controlled the board, then across the mess of wiring to the button that it would eventually light up.

Mirah reached her arm out, tapping the button like she had so many times before, yet the board hadn't yet displayed its second number in the countdown.

Mirah continued, her mind following the line with an ease that was only held back by how quickly her own body could be moved in the sequential motions. At a few points, she even used a foot to tap against a button she knew would be at the opposite end of the board from the previous one.

Then, in only a matter of seconds, Mirah reached the end of the thread before it terminated and slowly returned to the form it'd been in before she had pressed the button. Mirah blinked, realising that for the entire duration of the test she hadn't blinked once, and the world of darkness broken with golden threads disappeared to become a view of a familiar board with unfamiliar text emblazoned across its screen.

'Goal achieved.'

'Average time: {If you are viewing this message, please call our service helpline at–}'

Mirah stared uncomprehendingly at the text as the screen switched to a graph displaying the time each button was pressed in. The initial button press was done in -2.44 seconds; however it had quickly compounded with each count going higher and higher as the timer lagged behind Mirah's flawless execution of the future button positions. At some point the time had somehow elapsed the machine's own software, managing to break its ability to correctly display Mirah's average time with would have far exceeded -10 seconds.

The rest of the team, aside from their trainer, looked at the display dumbly. Ajax, even though he'd seen her use the board before, was befuddled by what Mirah had done, the total lack of illuminating buttons hade the act almost seems impossible.

Though Willem understood what he'd just witnessed, even if it was something he hadn't been sure he'd ever witness himself.

"Well." He began, his voice laden with some measure of shock, "Maybe I should've gotten corporate to spring for the linktech one." The team turned towards Willem, only Mirah deciding to continue looking at the board in faint disbelief.

"Care to tell us what that was?" Aaliyah said, most of her snark left by the wayside with the genuine curiosity about what she'd just witnessed.

"That, Aaliyah," Willem began as he rubbed his beard idly, "is the first sign of an immensely powerful precognitive."

"We already knew she was precognitive though, right?" Ajax broke in, still unsure of just how impressed he should be. Willem nodded slightly in affirmation.

"We did. A little bit precognitive. Enough to give her reaction times that you'd consider superhumans. But with those test scores?" Willem laughed dryly, "She'd know your next three moves before you threw your first punch."

The team turned back to Mirah wo was still looking at the little screen that switched between a few different displays, each of them quantifying her achievement in ways she didn't quite understand. Her teammates, however, marvelled quietly at their precognitive team member.

"Isn't that kinda…" Walter stared at Mirah intently, "crazy powerful?" Willem snorted loudly, forcing even Mirah to turn and look at him.

"Welcome to the wild world of Linked, where what we consider normal can change at any Godforsaken moment." He sighed deeply, but continued on, "Alright, let me think more about this as you all go and run around the track twenty times as fast as you can. Mirah, you're free to try get a better time if you'd like."

The rest of the team, mostly Walter, gave her an envious look, but she quickly shook her head after looking bewilderedly back at the board of lights.

"I'll go."

Willem watched as they left the room and turned to stare at the screen still cycling through Mirah's results.

"Fucking hell," he murmured to himself, "colour me damn impressed." He stood there dumbfounded for a few more seconds before he whipped out a phone at least a decade old and dialled in a number with the physical buttons at a rapid speed. The call went through, with a click and a muffled greeting.

"Tracker," he greeted quietly before waiting as she said something, "Yeah they're all doing fine, I've sent them all to do laps so I could give you this call." She said something snarky and he snorted gently.

"Well, maybe. Though you might find this worth prematurely waking you up." He waited another second as Tracker grumbled through her own phone.

"Yeah, it's about Mirah's link." He paused for a touch of drama and then let the cat out of the bag, "Do you have any clue how powerful a precog you have to be before you can break one of the cheapo PC-LightBoards?"

There was an audible splutter as Tracker spat out her coffee over the other end of the phone as the call clicked to signify its end. Willem pulled the phone from his ear, looking down at the screen with a wild grin.

"Yeah, thought so."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 47: Appraisal

"Jesus Willem," Tracker said as she watched over Mirah and Aaliyah's bout, "you're really laying into them." Willem snorted absentmindedly, watching the bout intently as the two team members went at each other with a ferocious speed that he'd hammered into them. They weren't allowed to use their links for the duration of these hand-to-hand matches, though it wouldn't be long before they'd be using their links in practice.

Mirah, now capable of controlling when she was and was not using her link, had become surprisingly adept at hand to hand. The willowy, emaciated girl that had first walked into Willem's training area had transformed into a girl with a fair amount of muscle and a good eye for combat in general.

When Tracker said that Willem was going hard on the trainees, she wasn't wrong. Usually, Willem found that giving his trainees as much time to acclimate before the harder, more gruelling training began was a boon. Two months or so wasn't all that uncommon, especially when many were coming to grips with being Linked at all.

But this little team of Undefineds don't have the time, and it was clear that they knew it.

Willem had taken almost complete control over their schedules over the past week, filling it entirely with rigorous physical and mundane combat training. The team hadn't uttered one word of complaint, other than the groans of pain and short sentences of weary frustration.

Willem watched as the decisive moment was made, the movement that would lead to the match's winner. Aaliyah stretched out with a punch, seeking Mirah's padded jaw, but instead found thin air. Mirah, being astoundingly good at recognising weaknesses, moved into Aaliyah's guard, grabbing hastily at the offending arm, and twisting her body so she could throw Aaliyah's much taller body over her back and onto the floor with a mighty whoosh.

The match was over, Willem easily deciding it in Mirah's favour. The team had been performing these quickfire matches continuously for almost four hours now, exhausting them both mentally and physically in a way that running around a track or using exercise equipment couldn't quite reproduce.

Mirah stood, her face up to the ceiling while breathing heavily, sweat poured off of her light brown skin, having already soaked through any and all clothing and protective equipment she was wearing. Aaliyah was much the same, though she laid on the ground, blond hair splayed out around her having fallen out of the tight bun she kept it in during training.

Aaliyah hit the padding beside her with as much might as her weak body could produce without adding her link to the mix, growling with frustration, and adding a few choices swears before stumbling to her feet and walking off to a secluded corner of the training area.

Mirah looked about ready to reach out to the girl, or to try stop her, but Ajax subtly intervened. Although he whispered in her ear, not intending for any to hear, Willem had exceptionally good hearing.

"Just let her go, she needs to cool off for a minute." Ajax's much larger form easily impeded Mirah from leaving his grip on her shoulder even if she wanted to. She gave a stoic nod and removed herself from the padded flooring, allowing Ajax and Walter their bout.

Willem watched on as the comically size disparate duo began their duel, something that had become a much more interesting sight in recent times as Walter gained an express interest in grappling and holds.

"When will they be ready for real combat training?" Tracker said from beside him, clearly having gotten tired of waiting for the stocky coach to answer her previous question. Willem gently picked underneath his nail with another; the thoughtful action hidden beneath the bicep of his crossed arms.

"Tomorrow." He said finally, making the dark brown skinned woman give him a look of consternation.

"This soon? As soon as you put them in combat training they'll be open to challenge." Tracker warned, but Willem only let his grey eyes flicker over to Tracker's for a moment before returning to the match.

"I'm not a dunce, Tracker." He held out a long pause as Walter managed to trip Ajax and put him on the floor, hastily putting the much larger man's arm in a painful hold, "But they don't have time to waddle about and get ready. The trainee program is at capacity and Baxter's team has too much leverage to pull for me to fight back against it for long."

Tracker's phone beeped with a message, prompting her to pull it out from her pocket and quickly reply while she talked with an almost absentminded tone.

"Has the timeline changed?" Willem nodded, letting Tracker finish typing the message and send it. She turned on the man in full now, her expression prepared to take the bad news. "How much?"

"Two months."

As prepared as Tracker was, she still couldn't quite defend against the wave of resignation Willem's answer provoked. Two months was barely time enough for anything, let alone training a team to a level that would be at all acceptable in the long term. The fact that many in the team had made so much progress in their links in the short time that they'd been training here was almost astounding, especially with Mirah revealing a whole new side to her own link, a massive step forward.

Baxter's team was hardly even the sole worry at this point. The real worry is what would happen when they got outside of the AASAU, when they were truly exposed to the world and all its dangers, dangers that even fully trained up Linked constantly die to, let alone a group of glorified children who've been trained for all of three months and some change.

"Don't worry." Willem said quietly to her, the soothing tone he used was jarring in comparison to his normally brusque manner of speech. Tracker smoothed out her custom suit bought in Italy, pre-war with France, and smiled easily.

"I'm not worrying." She lied, and she knew that he could see right through it. He turned away from her, his gaze returning to the still struggling men on the ground and getting prepared to call it in favour of Ajax once again.

"I have some friends that can help. Don't worry." He said to her before he called the winner of the match for the final time that day. All the team members, including Aaliyah, who trudged from over in her corner to line up in front of Willem. Willem pointedly ignored Tracker's questioning gaze, wondering just who these friends were supposed to be.

"You've all done well this week, all of you have made excellent progress in your fighting skills." The team lightened up a bit at that, even Mirah's cold expression warmed a little at the edges of her eyes, "However, training in mundane combat will only get you so far when Linked are involved. There is no use in grappling a man who can turn into smoke or punch a woman who is made of rubber."

"We're doing link combat training?" Walter said excitedly, a spark of cheer entering his eyes, though it was quickly snuffed out by his own realisation, "Wait, that means we can get challenged, right?"

The rest of the team, barring Aaliyah, turned to look at the Asian man, question obvious in their gazes. He coughed lightly, "Rich told me about it." Ajax nodded, willing to take the man on his word, though her noticed that Aaliyah already knew what it all meant and had her face scrunched up in a mixture of too many emotions to count, most of them not even clearly appearing on her skin in their little coloured spots.

"You will be able to be challenged, yes. Other teams will be able to ask you for a fight, and at least once a week you have to agree to one of them and host it on the weekend slot." Ajax opened his mouth to ask a question, but Aaliyah got to him before he could even say the first word.

"No, that doesn't mean we can just ignore Baxter's team. They can have their trainer petition for a match, and they'll get it. Besides, we still have Graduation." Aaliyah's words came with a tone of frustration, not unusual for the girl, but only making the new information even more unsettling.

"Someone's a quick study." Tracker said, grinning at the girl, taking the reins from Willem's hands for a moment. "There's no point trying to rationalise why they have all these ridiculous measures in place. It's all bureaucracy to the extreme."

"Uh, what's Graduation?" Ajax looked between Aaliyah, Tracker, and Willem hesitantly, "I'm assuming we don't just get our certification and leave?" Willem barked coarsely with laughter.

"No, that would be too easy. Conventional graduation is much like that, just being given a final test and sent on your way, but since this team is funded to such a degree, including having a personal trainer and minder, you're required to go through Graduation." He enunciated the initial syllable of the word just to exemplify the difference between the two.

"It's a gauntlet of battles against the others in the training program that are in combat training, from weakest to strongest. In the latter fights… well, things have less stringent rules to rely upon." The team all grimaced, Walter grasping at the arm that'd been destroyed in his first ever match, a slight tingling feeling hidden deep in the flesh of it.

"We're being pushed up further, aren't we?" Aaliyah said, her mind as sharp as a scalpel, confusing the others in her team with the leap of logic, "There would be no point in putting us through 'Graduation' if Baxter's team was going to leave before we did. They've been here for seven months, and if they go for the ten months instead of eight, then they'll want us to Graduate in less than that."

The agony on the faces of the trainees as they looked to Willem and Tracker for confirmation was almost palpable. Willem nodded, citing his earlier two-month prediction, eliciting a chorus of groans, even Mirah joining in on the exasperated symphony.

"We're supposed to live through this Graduation with two months training. Is that from now, or was it a week ago when we started doing this training?"

"A week ago," though Willem paused for a moment before correcting himself, "or almost two weeks, after your recoveries." They almost managed to groan yet again before Tracker snapped her fingers commandingly.

"Be quiet!" She said harshly, breaking the usually amiable persona she held, "You don't have time to moan and groan. Besides, surviving your Graduation isn't going to be the problem, it's what comes afterwards."

"Afterwards?" Walter squeaked, a nervous frown worming its way onto his face while he clasped his hands together in a white-knuckled grip.

"When you're no longer in here, and there isn't anyone to protect you from what Baxter and his team might do when they too get out of here. You have what amounts to almost two months to get yourself ready for what comes after Graduation, especially with what I can already see that you'll want to be doing once you do."

The team, sufficiently called out on their heroic inclinations, stayed quiet as they looked around the room sourly. Aaliyah was just frustrated and angry, all around. Her future was being controlled from the shadows with no real way for her to usefully affect it. She knew that she was going down a dangerous path, even if she wasn't as into the whole heroicism thing as Walter and Ajax were.

Mirah and her shared many opinions on the matter, having talked to her more, though Mirah's ideals were inherently more black-and-white than reality really reflected. Aaliyah was too self-preservationist to have the grand ideals of saving people like the boys, but she could see a little bit of merit in gaining indisputable social power by just continuously doing good things with your link.

It wasn't a strategy that was open to many, and even their team had their own bonds that kept them tied to earth, stopping them for wholeheartedly throwing their lives into the meatgrinder of heroics.

But Aaliyah was starting to come around to the idea that they could really do something, whether the change was big or small. She decided, in that moment, that she would put it down to these weeks of training. If they went well, then she'd commit herself entirely, and if it didn't, then she'd have to fund another path, unwilling to just let herself die to idealism.

"Alright," She said, iron conviction filling her voice and covering her skin in a strong orange colour, "let's find out what we're worth then, shall we?"

That same willpower, blooming in the strong orange colour across her skin, slowly began to infuse into the team around her. Everyone in Aaliyah's presence realised that they were being influenced by the colour painted onto her skin, and they all took note of what it was doing to them, yet they couldn't help but be brought into the powerful moment.

Ajax nodded, patting Walter on the back reassuringly as the shorter man tried to wipe the worry from his face. Mirah stayed quiet, but her green eyes sharpened to a point and Aaliyah crossed her arms as if to say, 'What have you got for us?'.

Willem observed them, a grin slowly spreading across his face as he began to feel the enthusiasm build within him, the feeling of finally finding a team that could do it. One that was willing to go the mile, just to reach the starting line.

"Good. Very good."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 48: Royalty

Julia woke from her state of pseudo 'sleep' with a start, a harsh noise blaring from a set of speakers in the roof of her room. It was a noise that she'd become well acquainted with over the past months during training, the alarm signifying the beginning of a day of hard training, usually combat focused training.

One of the major upsides to her vastly altered form was the ability to almost instantly wake from the state of light sleep that she only had to maintain for a few hours a day. Instead of their being any real grogginess, she was working at full capacity right from the word go.

If only it didn't come at the cost of any recognisably human features.

Julia pulled herself from the bed that she used, mostly out of an ingrained comfort than any tangible difference than just sleeping on a concrete floor. She let her flattened and puddle like form drip to the floor, pooling of the flat and hard surface before she counted to three and did the equivalent to an overweight man sucking in their gut.

In a mere moment she recreated the skin that covered over the rest of her semi-liquid body, inbuilding much of what she used for the day. She'd created the method of doing this after a lot of experimentation in the months after she'd Awakened and become this monstrous thing.

After that… she'd laid off on experimenting with her biology, much to the frustration of those around her. It was probably capable of being her biggest asset, and yet she just stuck to something she understood, as if ignoring the capabilities of her biology would make the reality of it less real.

She looked around her room, disappointed that she'd have to leave its comfort so soon in the morning, but such was training at the AASAU. Her room was sparse, lacking much int eh way of personalisation other than the bedsheets and pillows which had all been hers since before her Awakening.

The walls remained their unblemished off white, most of the parts of her room going completely untouched, sticking instead to the bed that she spent much her time in outside of training. The need to personalise wasn't very strong in Julia, in comparison to Jamie's room which was practically a whole now room to when they first moved in, all dark tones and album art from the latest and greatest covering the walls.

Julia resigned herself to the day and rolled herself out the door like you'd roll a heavy stone, a tendril quickly whipping out of her body to open the door easily. She entered into the main living area of the team dorm room, easily the first of her team members to have arrived even when she dawdled. In the centre of the room, however, was a figure that she wasn't expecting.

Instead of their regular training instructor Maryanne, a middle aged Linked who has a low-level strength Link, stood an average, if a little bookish looking man. Julia had seen him and listened to him talk on a few occasions, though she'd barely ever done so, even on an impersonal basis.

But she knew, with the small knack she'd picked up for recognising stronger Linked through her combat training, that this man was strong. He wasn't short, but he wasn't tall either. He looked physically able, but nothing like the developed muscle that a man Like Ajax, or even the sleek muscle like Ren had. But he felt large, as if he were easily five time the size that his physical body took up.

The man, dressed in a general blue-green trainer's outfit, pushed a pair of rounded glasses up his nose as he looked up from the tablet that he'd been intently working on. He peered neutrally through the lenses, ever so slightly amplifying the size and clarity of his brown irises.

"Julia Parson, I assume?" He said calmly, his voice a little more nasally than she remembered from the induction speech he'd given to all the new Linked as they were put into floor three's bootcamp. It'd been about six teams in total that had begun training that day, all assigned a training instructor to guide them.

But he was the step higher than that, he was the head instructor, the man that calls all the shots in the bootcamp floors, even the lower, cheaper floors were run by him in some fashion. He was Osmium, or David Braker as he'd introduced himself on her first day. She gaped for a second or two longer, before realising that the man was still waiting for a response, face perfectly clear of any discernible emotion.

"Uh, yes! I'm Julia, sir." She spluttered out, and the man nodded sharply, tapping a few times on his tablet in quick succession before simply staring at the tablet, leaving the room in silence. Julia, however, wasn't quite cognizant of that silence. She wasn't sure that there were many that could be when Osmium was standing in your dorm, not a few metres away from you.

Osmium was a legend in Melbourne and Brisbane, probably even Sydney too. Despite his pretty neutral and young looks, Osmium was old guard, having become a Linked right before things really went to shit in Australia at large. In fact, he was a step away from being a bona fide member of the Australian branch of the Enforcers, or the Sentinels, or whatever they'd tried to unsuccessfully rebrand themselves to after Suicide.

He'd been the real deal, a policeman turned 'superhero', keeping the other Linked in check on both sides of the law. As a kid, Julia and a whole generation, had at least a little hope as they'd watched the endless nostalgia content. Shows that television stations seemed to produce at astounding rates with content from when the Enforcers and Osmium's small group of Linked police were still active.

Though, that hope always died as soon as you watched the news and saw just how terrifying the world really was.

In the span of her musing, Julia watched Ren emerge from his room next, quickly assuming the same shocked double-take that Julia had experienced when she'd first witnessed the man that used to stand on top of Australia's Linked crime division of the Australian Federal Police.

"Ren Ikari?" Osmium said, his voice a gentle but flat tone.

"Yes, sir?" The Japanese immigrant said as he flipped the grass-like, green hair out of his face, having naturally grown at least eight inches since the night before. Osmium looked to Ren, nodded sharply, and then did a similar sequence of quick taps, again letting the room fall into silence.

Ren inched as close to Julia as he could with her only standing four feet and a few inches in her standard form, whispering in a hushed tone.

"Holy shit, we have Osmium standing in our room, Julia!" The bewilderment in his voice was clear, almost shellshocked by the turn of events so early in the day. In his shock, Julia could hear his almost flawlessly neutral accent slip into a more poignant Japanese one, something that Ren lovingly called 'engrish mode'.

"I know right? I knew he was the head instructor, with his speeches and all," Julia mused back after putting a tendril up to Ren's ear, speaking directly into it with a small node "but having him in our room is… different." Ren nodded excitedly, trying desperately to keep himself from letting the excitement reach his face too harshly.

Funnily enough, even though Ren was an immigrant from Japan, he was possibly the person most interested in Australian Linked and the power dynamics. He'd be able to talk your ear off for hours about how the Enforcers fell in America and how that effected the Australian branch, that would be rebranded a few times under different governance, until it eventually died almost a decade later. If you considered Osmium's department in the police an extension of that, of course.

Was Julia surprised when she'd found out that Osmium worked as a trainer in the AASAU nowadays? Immensely, especially with the reputation that the AASAU had for bending over backwards for 'those in power'.

The next to appear out of their room was Jamie, bleary eyed and sporting a dishevelled mop of bed hair. Julia and Ren, both having gotten over the momentary blast of starstruck-ness, watched on gleefully as Julia's eyes went wide after she noticed the legend standing in their living room, her mouth gaping open wide enough that you could just see the strange scales covering her jaw from behind her high collared hoodie.

"June Nkala?" He asked, glancing up at Jamie's face and frowning slightly, "My apologies. Jamie King?" The correction came quick enough that Jamie didn't even have time to disagree with the initial query. The reason for his quick change became clear as June Nkala herself stepped out of the room from the doorframe that was clearly too small for her.

Ajax might be a massive man, but June was something else, well and truly augmented by her Link into being the tallest person in the training facilities at the moment, though there were definitely taller Linked. The black-skinned woman stood at a mind boggling seven foot tall, dwarfing Julia's crush by over half a foot, but instead of the built muscle that Ajax possessed, June was the counter opposite.

In fact, it had been the entire reason she'd fled Zimbabwe with her family, because she was almost entirely skeletal, her body somehow defying gravity and remaining standing despite being able to see her bones laying just beneath her skin on most places of her body. If she didn't wear thick clothing most of the time, and use her ludicrously thick hair to her advantage, she'd be downright disturbing to look at. Not that Julia could talk, glass houses and all.

"Ah, June Nkala?" Osmium asked again, recounting hie earlier mistake. The massive woman, just as all the rest of them had, gaped with a stunned expression. She was surprised that June even knew who Osmium was, with her having come to live in Australia in her early teens after her early Awakening, rather than Ren's pre-teen.

"Yeah?" She said, stunned, her voice higher than you'd expect for someone her size, though she quickly amended with, "Sir?"

Osmium gestured to Julia and Ren, who had already begun a little line up, and Jamie and June quickly made their way into the sloppy line up, trying to hold down their astonishment.

"Good." David Braker said calmly, "I imagine it'd be a bit of a shock to see me here at morning line up instead of Maryanne?" He didn't smile, but Julia could sense at least a little bit of amusement in the man's eyes. They all nodded dumbly, though Jamie was the one to speak up, something unusual for her around people she didn't know or wasn't comfortable with.

"Did something happen to Maryanne?" There wasn't much worry in the voice, with the woman being at least strong enough to crush someone and tank a head on collision with a car, but it was a probing question nonetheless.

"No, nothing significant. I have simply asked for a favour to take over her team for a few days this week from now on." Julia and the rest of the team reeled in confusion, but Osmium didn't stop for a moment, "From now on, I will sporadically appear in your weekly schedule, though I will warn you that it is unlikely you will get much in the way of notice, other than my appearance on said day." The clear explanation just left the team even more confused, with Ren raising a hand tentatively, unsure if he was allowed to just talk normally.

"Ren?" Osmium nodded towards the green haired man, prompting him to speak.

"This sounds great, sir. It'd be an honour to work with you, and I think that all of us feel the same," Ren paused for a little bit, allowing his words to sink in, "but I'm not sure that I understand why we are being given specialised training from you personally. I was under the assumption that you didn't do personalised training because of the reduced impact that it has. Sir."

The confused sentence, coupled with the strangely tacked on 'sir' at the end made the others in the group silently cringe, hoping beyond hope that the legendary Linked didn't take any offense and just leave. Though, Julia found herself more curious as the moments ticked by without a forthcoming answer, with Ren even citing one of Osmium's own lectures as to why he acts as a head trainer instead of a personal trainer for the rich kids in the floors above them, not unlike Domain and Baxter's mini–Rightful Order team.

"A good question," Osmium replied finally, pressing the bridge of his glasses up his nose firmly then brushing back his short brown hair, greying slightly at the sides, "I am doing it as a favour to an old friend. It seems that for me to help, I'll have to do it directly. However, I do sometimes miss the experience of directly training a team." The vaunted ex-police officer scrunched his thin eyebrows together for a moment before unfurrowing them.

"I may not be able to provide the more comprehensive training that Maryanne would be able to, and most of your time with me as a trainer will involve combat directly with another team, but I will do my best to give your team as much knowledge as I can in the time I have you. Is this acceptable?" He asked, as forward and clearly spoken as he'd seemed in every interview he'd ever done.

As the team gave their clear and honest response in the positive, not ones to turn down training from the Osmium, something that was sure to aide them on any path they decided to take later in life, Julia began to let her mind wander into obscurity as they filed out of the room, following the powerful Linked to the Underground.

'I wonder if he still gets paid royalties on those TV appearances he did…'


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, Kreiverin, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patron; Andrew P.!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 49: Acquaintance

It was an easy start to the day for Ajax, having been a trained morning person for the vast majority of his life. It also probably helped that Linked needed to sleep less on average, something that just came along with the general health benefits of being a Linked, though it certainly didn't stop Walter from sleeping criminally small amounts.

Ajax stood outside of his little apartment with the others in his team, minus Walter of course, both Tracker and Willem being present for the big occasion. With almost no time to spare, Walter stumbled out of his room as he was still pulling on his shirt properly, giving the team a quick display of the lack in fat on his formerly chubby form.

"Glad you managed to make it." Willem said dryly as Walt slumped his form like a turtle would into its shell.

"Sorry guys." He squeaked out, though he'd said the same every morning for the entire week. Aaliyah rolled her eyes at the boy but didn't bother to make fun of him like she had the first few days, the joke having become stale long ago.

"Well, now that we're all here," Tracker began with a wide grin, "we'll all be going down to one of the more private arenas and meeting up with another team to train. This isn't a normal occurrence, but we pulled some strings." She said, proudly, though Willem shot her a glare.

"I pulled some strings." He clarified, though Tracker lost none of her pomp, doing a one-eighty and walking towards the metal doors of the elevator and pushing the call button with vigour.

"We'll have to skip breakfast for the morning, but we'll have an early lunch instead!" She stated, ignoring Willem's correction altogether, moving to enter the elevator that was opening directly in front of her. Willem sighed minutely, but Ajax and the rest of the team followed him into the elevator and waited the mere moments it took for Tracker to input the code needed to access the underground, and then for the elevator to go down deep underground without the slightest feeling of dizziness with the movement.

They followed the lead of Tracker and Willem, only having been to the main Arena once, but never the smaller arenas. The only reason that Ajax knew that there even where smaller arenas was the rough directional map that rested on the extremely clean walls of the Underground.

The trip was, again, surprisingly short for just how big the Underground felt at times. The optimised path that Tracker took, an alternate path to one that had passed through the Gym, sent the team past the line of rooms that they had been using for their lessons with tracker on their off days from training. Then further through a corridor that was line with rooms that almost seemed like scientific monitoring rooms—though Ajax was hardly one to make any real determination about that. All of the tech in there seemed pretty advanced, and if it wasn't linktech, then it was probably something close.

They passed by those rooms quickly, each of them seeming to have a slightly different purpose than the last. After pushing through a set of double doors that Ajax thought would be right at place within a high school, they found themselves in a far more populated hallway.

The hallway had the same lingering smell that the Gym possessed, the distinct smell of sweat and exertion. On a blue sign hanging from the ceiling, the letters 'A-1' were listed which signified the beginning of four doors that likely lead into a locker room, or equipment room.

"We're in B-3 today." Willem said, clear enough that the team could hear it, but alluding the ears of the few people inhabiting the hallways this early in the morning, clearly all getting ready for some match or another.

The walk continued with the numbers counting up every fifty or so metres, then at 'A-4' there was a longer gap, then another set of doors that lead to the beginning of the B block. After only a few more moments, Ajax and the rest of his little group filed into one of the four doors underneath the 'B-3' signage, finding it to be exactly as he'd expected.

The locker room wasn't quite as spacious as the one they'd been granted in the main Arena, and the equipment was likely separated into its own room sitting beside this one, but it was comfortable enough with six people inside, though fitting more than ten would get cramped and uncomfortable pretty fast.

Willem motioned at the slatted metal benches that stood isolated from the wall that contained a row of lockers, and probably very general equipment. The team sat, shimmying onto the bench, and having to cuddle up a little to fit in front of where Willem was standing.

"Alright, so," he began succinctly, "I called in a favour with a friend of mine who's also a trainer here at the AASAU. I gave him a rundown on what your links were, and he's bringing the team that could potentially challenge you most and give you the most growth in the least amount of time. Now," Willem gave the team a harsh glare, making sure to impress the importance of his next words into them with gusto, "I will not accept a poor performance from you all. I do not care how many times you struggle against your opponent, or how frustrating fighting against a counter might be, but you will continue without complaint."

Willems eyes dragged over the members of the team, Ajax being totally unperturbed by the proclamation, Mirah being basically the same, though even Willem had some difficulty reading her, Walter was just anxious, and Aaliyah pulled her lips thin with a little sourness in her expression.

"This team and their trainer's time is valuable, and until you are good enough to go head-to-head with them, they're going to be punching down and losing out on a lot of training time to help you. If you bow out, you'll have me to answer to. Am I understood?" The group nodded, having gotten the gist of it. Ajax watched as Walter's mental state dissolved ever so slightly under the new pressure that Willem added to the pile, though he didn't know what the man was worried about, he'd been one of the most dedicated to his training so far, despite his struggles.

After another moment Tracker, who had left the room a few moments into Willem's speech, popped her head back into the room, drawing the team's attention with a wave.

"They're ready! Get yourselves into some protective gear and come on through." She called, before returning out to the hallway. Willem soon followed, giving them all a nod and letting them get into gear.

Ajax quickly opened up one of the lockers on the wall randomly, but finding it full of equipment, nonetheless. He searched through the sizes on the equipment's tags, however none of them were the 2XL that he found most comfortable, though the 3XL was technically his size.

"Anyone got a 2XL in theirs?" He asked out loud, and after a few seconds of the others opening and rummaging through their own lockers, Walter piped up.

"Yeah, got one here. You have a medium in there?" Walter asked, his own locker somehow not having the most common size. Ajax grabbed the medium off of a hanger and traded with the much smaller man. But as Ajax turned to quickly strap himself up with the protective padding, he caught a look at Walter's conflicted face. Before Walter could turn around and move back to his own locker, Ajax reached out and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder.

"Hey, we'll be fine Walt. These guys aren't looking to actually hurt us badly." Walter, while not entirely mollified, at least nodded along with the reassurance before pulling away from the large hand and going to change.

It was only a few more minutes before they were all out in the hallway, having changed into the navy-blue protective equipment with a practiced ease, something Mirah had struggled with momentarily when they'd started doing fighting more. Willem didn't bother to give another speech, instead leading them towards the door directly diagonal from their own with a little plaque on it saying, 'Arena B-3', which made perfect sense when the door opened to a hallway that opened up into a much smaller arena than the last one, they'd fought in, though it was still pretty impressive all told.

Instead of the sandy floor that they'd had for their gladiator fight, it was a solid, but still slightly springy material that was probably linktech to some degree. It wasn't something that Ajax expected would be hard to move on but would probably stop any of them getting injured too bad if they were slammed into the floor, or just fell.

However, the smaller arena, with its lack of seating instead going for the drawn sideline approach, was hardly the most interesting part of the view.

"Julia!" Ajax called out, speeding up and passing by Willem and Tracker as he moved closer to greet the amorphous, purple woman. The other team, none of whom Ajax could immediately recognise, turned to look at him as he jogged up to greet them.

"O-oh, Ajax." Julia's crystalline voice warbled with surprise, "Are you the other team we're training with?" Ajax frowned for a moment, looking over the faces of each of her teammates. There was one other man in the team who had strange plant-like hair down to his shoulders, an incredibly tall woman with very dark skin stretched over a skeletal frame, probably from some African heritage, and one other woman, much shorter than the rest of her team—barring Julia—who wore a baggy pull-over with a high collar and long sleeves underneath her protective gear.

"Yeah, I guess we are." He moved his immediate attention away from Julia and instead looked to the others in her group with a wide and welcoming grin, "Nice to meet you all, I'm Ajax. I've hung out with Julia a few times now." There was a sharp snort from the shorter girl, though when Ajax looked towards her questioningly, she didn't meet his gaze, instead looking anywhere else.

"I, uh, yeah we know about you." She stammered out, before noticing the odd smile on Ajax's face, deciding to push forward with her own greeting, "I'm Jamie, by the way. Julie's bestie." Ajax grinned widely as he stuck out a hand, prompting her to shake it with a flick of his gaze.

Without thinking, Jamie took the hand, and he shook it solidly and then let it drop to her side. It was only till a moment later that Jamie realised her misstep, panicked eyes looking up towards the much taller man's form, terrified of the expression that he might possess.

Yet, he wasn't even looking at her anymore.

"Ajax," the man introduced again to the green haired man, who quickly introduced himself as Ren, along with a solidly powerful handshake.

"June." The last woman said easily, her tone given spice by an open and rounded sounding amalgam of an Australian accent with whatever else, only adding to the mystique of the woman for Ajax.

"Nice to meet you all," he said after shaking her frail looking hand, and finding her strength to be similarly weak. He turned back to see his team standing behind him, waiting somewhat awkwardly to be introduced by the sometimes painfully extroverted man.

"Alright, I'm Ajax, as stated earlier," He then began to gesture at each of his teammates in the order of appearance, "this is Mirah, Walter, and Aaliyah. Guys," he turned back to the new team, "this is Julia, Jamie, Ren, and June." He thought for a moment, "That's a lot of 'J' names."

A grin exploded onto Jamie's face, only visible around her eyes and nose as they scrunched, with the high collar hiding her lower face. Ren rolled his eyes as the rest of the team gave him a look that could only be an allusion to an inside joke. The two teams waved at each other, murmuring more personal greetings.

"Yup, there definitely is." Ren said as he ran a hand through his hair, making it rustle like the leaves on a tree. However, any further conversation was cut off by Willem walking from between Mirah and Walter, his movement prompting another man to walk from between the Jamie and Ren, meeting in the centre of the space.

"Good to see you again." Willem said gruffly, and the other man nodded. As Ajax looked at the bespectacled, middle-aged man, only just reaching average height, that his face was oddly familiar. He looked over the rest of his group, seeing that both Aaliyah and Walter were having the same strange moment of half-remembrance, though Mirah didn't seem to be experiencing any emotion at all, as per usual.

"My pleasure." The man spoke with a clear rhythm and tone that added yet another piece to the jigsaw puzzle. In fact, there was almost no-one of Ajax's generation that wouldn't at least recognise the distinctive pattern of speech. There was a small gasp from behind Ajax as Walter clearly figured it out, drawing a querying gaze from the other team, though when they saw his face, their expressions changed into something more empathetic.

"You're Osmium?" Walter said, a mixture of disbelief and pure shock entwined with his already nervous voice. The grin from the members of the other team was instant with the proclamation, finding yet another to share in their mutual disbelief. The plain looking man, who was once the most powerful government aligned Linked in Australia, turned a candid gaze towards Walter's expression of bewilderment, then nodded.

"Ah, yes. Though I prefer to be called by my given name as the Osmium name technically stays within the Linked Crime Unit at the AFP. David Braker, nice to meet you all."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patron; Jokarun! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., someguy, Ryan U.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 50: Go Again

Tracker scratched at her chin pensively as she watched the two teams interact, Willem and David standing between them as they were introduced to Osmium being a trainer at the AASAU.

If she were being honest, it'd caught her off guard when she'd first met the man at a casual even that she'd made time for years ago. Meeting the man had been mind blowing, someone that had been a part of her own young adulthood, a role model for a generation of children.

She couldn't have possibly stopped herself from asking every question that came to mind, something that the man didn't actually seem too fussed by, though he did purposefully obfuscate some things. He was ex-law enforcement after all.

The man was exactly like he seemed on television all these years, though lacking the secret identity that he'd formed and without the uniform and very official mask to cover his face. He'd always seemed more intimidating and powerful in what had simply come to be known as Osmium's 'costume' and without it he seemed almost… frail in comparison.

Though, Tracker wasn't fooled. Not that anyone would truly be fooled. Willem, much shorter and stockier than the other man, greeted him quietly and held out a balled fist in the space between them. The two men looked at each other intensely for a moment, David Braker's taciturn expression meeting Willem Ross' stoically neutral.

The gentle lift in the legendary Linked's face was all the warning that they got before David connected his knuckles with Willem's, both reeling back a few centimetres, and then clashing their fists against one another with a sound like someone had been hit in the head with a sledgehammer.

A sound that Tracker personally wished she'd have forgotten by now.

The clash didn't look like much, if you were deaf, but the power that went into that simple fist bump was more than enough to kill a regular human in a heartbeat. The two men were entirely unmoved, dropping their hands to their sides with no discernible sign of injury.

"Still kept some of your strength?" Willem said, loud enough that Tracker could easily hear it from here, a rare sign of Willem being excited by something. David's eyebrow rose in his ever-perfunctory way.

"And your own continues to grow." No question about it, the man was absolutely sure in his statement. Tracker's ears perked up at the mention of Willem's strength, the rare nugget of information about the secretive man. Tracker knew more than most about Willem, but not many knew Willem before he became a trainer at the AASAU, making David a rare resource.

Willem waved a hand, as if the statement from his old friend was a given. Tracker tried to gain some contextual information from the two men, but as stoic as they both were, it was virtually impossible.

After that, the men began to talk to their teams about how training was going to work, and what training entailed. It was pretty standard stuff, at least for now. The more regular training usually involved combat games that would test teamwork and other important skill sets.

However, Willem wasn't training them for those situations. They were unimportant in comparison to the training's actual purpose. It'd been stated to the team the importance for preparing themselves to match what the outside world had to offer, and while it might've been nice and impactful for the moment, they've clearly reverted ever so slightly into thinking more narrowly.

They were worried about Baxter, about his father, about what could happen to them in the near future. There was probably a portion of that that worry that considered what would happen to them on the outside, what Ernest Baxter might pull out of the bag to launch his son's notoriety into the sky, but they weren't worrying enough.

Tracker and Willem weren't foolish, they'd seen the way that the team was going. It wasn't super often, but Tracker and Willem had both seen trainees go through the mandated training and come out the other side, hoping to make a difference in the world with their links.

It never worked. It always ended in being broken by the world around you, an unrelenting machine of people sticking so fastidiously to the status quo of the world. When another 'hero' appears, people don't look to them with the hope that the hero expects, they watch as the people they want to help place bets on their inevitable demise, or their eventual disappearance.

The beginning for a hero, however, is still the easiest part. People can power through the ridicule and the scorn, even the hate, but what can't be powered through is the reality of the death that was required to be wrought.

The naïve hero doesn't expect to meet a foe that won't submit. They underestimate the live or die mentality that surrounds Linked everywhere they go, and when they try to insert themselves into the situation with a moral compass that tells them that they need to help these Linked, to try and reform them, they die.

You can't talk down a lion or a tiger from a murderous rage. You can't spout platitudes at the Linked druglord and expect anything more than getting shot. To do any of those two things, with any confidence, you needed power beyond anything that the little team of Undefined Linked had.

They had promise, yes. Ajax with a link that had the potential to be one of the vaunted 'scaling' links, capable of rising to meet the occasion. Walter with his ability to potentially generate and control the four mythological elements to his will, if his will was enough. Aaliyah with her potential as an immensely powerful physical tank, along with the strange effects that her other emotions have, like her determination from only so long ago.

Then Mirah, with whatever the hell her link was supposed to be.

The potential, while not astoundingly obvious, was there. However, it was all predicated upon the individuals to learn to use their links in such a way that they almost couldn't be considered Undefined any longer. They needed power, and they needed it all the time.

Tracker watched Willem sort out the teams into pairs. Ajax was with Ren, both of the men that'd become the de facto leaders of their respective teams. Aaliyah was placed against Jamie, the girl in the long sleeved and high collared pullover, an interesting matchup. Walter was with Julia, the elemental controller against the purple blob of indeterminant power. And finally, Mirah was placed against the extremely tall Zimbabwean girl, June.

Tracker had done research on the other team in preparation for the day, ready to build a report and grill each team member on their performance, and what they should or should not have done. It was something that would have been easier if there were such thing as a 'standard' matchup, but where links were involved, standardisation failed to meet expectations.

The pairs were split into quarters of the field, with Willem interacting with his AASAU provided smartphone to control the field's basic functions. It was with an unceremonious beginning that the pairs began to spar with one another, with winners of individual spars appearing almost instantaneously.

Mirah, as expected, lost immediately, having been tripped only moments after she'd confirmed the beginning of the spar with her partner. Her partner was somewhat notorious for her matches in the past, almost always winning, and always within moments of the match starting.

June Nkala was amazingly fast, one of the fastest Linked that Tracker had ever personally witnessed. Her body was changed entirely since she'd Awakened to her link, remodelling it from a somewhat standard five foot tall in her young teens into a seven-foot tall being, optimised for speed both physically and supernaturally.

The moment of extreme speed was almost entirely unperceivable to Tracker, even as she threw all her mental power towards seeing it in real time. June's seven foot frame warped and contorted into a pose entirely impossible for a human to reproduce, using the massive flexibility she'd gained from her physical changes with astonishing precision.

The young woman had lost almost all physical strength as her link had morphed her body, instead being replaced with freakish flexibility and astounding agility, not to mention the enhancement to her nerves and their tiny response time.

Mirah had no chance, even if she'd properly prepared herself to read the other woman's upcoming movements, or if that was even how her own link truly functioned at all. Mirah was on the ground, staring at the mess of metal beams and concrete that made up Arena B-3's ceiling, June crouching above her with a hand outstretched.

Tracker didn't have time to ruminate on the fight further before the second victory was about to be decided. Aaliyah had met her direct match, someone capable of standing toe to toe with her power other than Ajax on a good day, and Willem of course. The two girls went at the fight with an extreme intensity, though the whirlwind of battle didn't reveal all too much for the outside onlooker.

It was only with an eagle eye that Tracker was able to spot the claws that Aaliyah was fending off with her rage powered strength and durability, Jamie's unending onslaught of attacks leaving her almost entirely unable to do anything but dodge and block.

Tracker knew the reason for Jamie's oversized pullover, both for her own social shyness and the tactical benefit to it. It hid the fact that Jamie's arms were almost twenty percent longer than average, even longer when she had her claws fully extended.

Something that Jamie, despite her distaste for her form, used excellently. With a short jump into the air, the girl stretched out her arms to full length, slashing at Aaliyah from both of sides. With no choice but to block, Aaliyah quickly found herself locked in a death grip but the other girl's scaled grip. With an action almost like a slingshot, Jamie launched herself forwards and Aaliyah's body towards hers and planted two feet into her gut, smashing her into the ground with ease.

A brutal finish, one that could have easily disembowelled if Jamie had extended the claws on her feet as well.

Ajax's own defeat was next, unable to summon the power he needed to defeat the other man in hand to hand, he was only put at an even further disadvantage when Ren started to actually use his link.




Ren was not a man that you underestimated, not that Ajax would dare do anything like that. The Japanese man was an exceptional example of how strange links could easily be just as strong, if not stronger, than a more conventional link. The man's link? Plant based hair.

It was strange, but you could see Ren's hair grow out from his scalp at a speed that Tracker couldn't help but think would hurt like hell. The green, thinly bladed hair formed around his body quickly, tightly weaving itself around his body in layer after layer, leaving him looking like he was wearing a textured, green body suit.

But the effect was undeniable.

With Ren being extremely proficient in martial arts of almost every kind, it was a pure display of enhanced human movement and technique. Ajax might be strong, and far stronger than Ren was when he had something to protect, but Ren had control.

The fight ended with Ajax on the floor, pinned underneath an effortlessly positioned Ren. The man not even having to show an inkling of his true moveset.

The admirable final contender was Walter. No-one was truly all that surprised, with Walter somehow becoming the most powerful Linked in his team. The somewhat hesitant beams of fire extending from his hands were his first mistakes, with Julia's form being effectively impervious to fire until extremely high heats, one of the reasons that he'd been placed against her.

Julia was a woman of many mysteries when it came to her link.

An amorphous blob of something, possessing strange qualities beyond most of what even Linked science can really understand. However, the actual 'use' of her link came more in the manipulation of sound.

She was so extremely close to being labelled an Undefined, but her link was simply too useful of an idea to pass up. And as Tracker observed from the sidelines, she watched as Walter got a firsthand experience with just how important sound was to your perception.

Tracker could see Julia's jelly-like body shudder and shiver as it produced strange sounds, unbearable to anyone but Walter. If Tracker was to hazard a guess, she'd bet that Julia was feeding an exact recreation of Walter's special sound, back to him half a second later.

It wasn't something that would be considered extremely useful in any normal situation, but in a battle scenario with an opponent who wasn't expecting it, it was intensely valuable. Tracker could see Walter go through the checklist in his mind, trying to understand what was wrong with his perception. Was it his sight? Was it just the sound?

The delay was a killer.

Walter wasn't able to react fast enough to Julia's form as it sprang towards him. Julia's purple body had constricted itself and then let the pressure within bounce her forth with explosive propulsion, hitting Walter directly in the chest with her mass.

It only took a moment for Julia to form her body over Walter's binding him in place with his arms forced straight upwards and unable to burn her with the origin point of his flames being pointed away from her.

And that's all it took for Tracker's little team of Undefined to collapse like a house of cards. She looked at their faces as they realised just how much Baxter's team had been forced to hold back due to their being judges present.

"What are you all waiting for?" She called, hands up to her mouth as she jeered, "Get back up and go again!"


A/N: Well, well, there's the big five-oh. Lots of chapters, ey? I hope you've all been enjoying along with me as I write my little stories out to the world.

Thanks for tuning in on my posts, thank you for the theorisation and interest you've taken, and thank you for the beautiful words you've sent my way.

I can only hope to continue to give you moments of enjoyment furthermore.

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 51: Cheap Weapons

Julia sat on the sidelines of the fields, Walter sitting beside her after an hour of straight fighting. She'd dominated him in combat, the only element that he had any real control over wasn't effective against her semi liquid form, not until it was hot enough that she was literally boiling. By that point, they'd likely be standing in air so hot that it'd kill anyone in the vicinity first before her.

Walter sat, staring down at the ground with a stunned expression, every few moments he would raise a water bottle to his lips and take a few gulps of water before returning to his gaze. Julia stealthily stared at the man, worried about just what he thought of her, of the fighting, and what he might say.

"Wow." He said abruptly intoned. Julia's anxiety peaked; the man's neutral tone left everything up to question. She was ready for a scathing set of words, about anything really. She'd accrued insults of almost any kind, from the way she used her abilities, to how she now looked, even to those who seemed to want to deny her any humanity at all. She scrunched in on herself, the purple drawing into a deeper colour.

"That was awesome." The man beside her said, lacking any of the punch that an insult would have. Walter, who she vaguely remembered from her conversation with Ajax, was still staring listlessly into space. It was as if she wasn't even all that important, or rather, her horrifying form wasn't important.

"Um," she began nervously, trying to play down the crystalline sound of her voice that made her sound alien, "excuse me?" Walter's eyebrows furrowed before his dark eyes flickered over to her darkened purple form, almost surprised to be addressed at all.

"I mean, that was awesome?" He half questioned, quirking an eyebrow at her, "You're, like, really strong."

There were no heated words or scalding comments. As Julia looked at him critically, she couldn't find anything even remotely close to anger or frustration in the man's expression. He was different than the others she'd fought against.

"I guess I am?" Julia said, hesitantly taking the compliment while she still searched for the moment, she'd see the flare of anger in her training partner's face. But instead of anger, Walter grinned with a boyish excitement, wrapping his arms around his legs and pulling them into him.

"Come on, you're more impressive than that!" He scoffed at her jokingly, turning a quizzical eye at her, "You can fuck with people's very perception of their surroundings. I couldn't tell what your link was until a few matches in. That's a huge advantage!"

Of course, Julia knew this. She'd been abusing the advantage for months as she and her team slowly made it through training and the fighting that came with it. It was astounding how much damage you could do to someone when their very perceptions were being thrown off, and extremely few Linked had any real protection of the senses in that way.

"Have you guys been doing the whole 'challenging' thing?" Walter said, switching topics on a dime with a bubbly excitement, "'Cause apparently we're going to be doing that soon."

A few silent moments cut through the budding conversation like a pair of garden shears. Walter turned towards the purple blob he only knew as Julia and found possibly the most genuine expression of mortification he could imagine on a featureless semi-liquid form.

Her form was pulled upwards, as if someone were pinching it and pulling it so, the front of her body—or what was facing him—was flattened with little ripples running across her surface.

"You're what?" She demanded, "You can't have even been in here a few months!" The warbling, crystalline voice shuddered against his body with a powerful vibration. It wasn't loud, per se, but it was intense enough to make the hairs on his arms stand up straight.

"Uh, yeah? Around there. I haven't been count–" Julia's form just about faceplanted into the dirt, a muffled groan rumbling through her relatively small body, "–ing. Well, I'm imagining that it's worse than I thought?"

"Worse than you thought?" She exclaimed, her tone almost combative. Walter almost flinched away from her as her voice rose in a fiery crescendo. She gave herself a moment, trying desperately to reassure herself that he wasn't like the other trainees, like the ones she needed to be angry at.

"Look, I'll explain it to you clearly." She sighed internally, preparing herself to tell the man about the nightmare he was walking into.

---

​

"Huh," Aaliyah said in half-amusement, "that seems like an abuseable system." She shifted her weight onto another foot as she stared at her much shorter training partner. She knew vaguely about the team itself, she knew quite a few of the teams by this point, though she'd never been given much of a reason to learn names and home addresses quite yet.

"Well, yeah." The other girl said, rolling her eyes with unabashed distaste, "All the teams are supposed to figure out amongst themselves who their challenge will be mutually. So, it's abusable all sorts of ways." Aaliyah laughed, flipping her golden locks over her shoulder, hair that was unfortunately just as enhanced as the rest of her body while she was covered in red spots. Even when the blue colour was there to counteracting the red, something Jamie assumed was to keep her sane, with the red obviously being rage.

"You could collude to have another team paired with a brutal one as payback, you could effectively force wins and defeats due to matchups, you could force teams into a random pool where matchups'll be decided by random draw." Aaliyah laughed, "Did they really think Linked were actually going to play fair?"

Jamie almost shivered under the larger woman's gaze, even though she knew that she was strong enough to beat the other girl black and blue. Aaliyah, as Jamie had learned over the past hour, was scary for more reasons than just being strong. She was more than just strong, she was adaptable. Something that Jamie lacked herself.

It'd started happening somewhere in the first few minutes of really fighting each other. Jami was putting the other girl down into the dirt with an ease she hadn't been able to replicate since the time they'd been put in a challenge with a newbie team.

"They were modelling it off of a school project." Jamie shrugged, "But anyway, point is that you're going to get smashed unless you're able to pull a new team each week under your banner. And if you're shit at fighting," She let her eyes glance up and down the other woman's body, as if appraising her muscle tone, "which you are, then no-one's going to wanna fight you."

"Why's that?" Aaliyah said, eyebrow raised, "You'd think that people would have figured out how to bludge through training, at least with a system as crap as this." Jamie idly scratched at the wall behind her, made of what looked like concrete but was actually some linktech derivative she'd forgotten to remember the name of. The only real difference was that, with concrete, she could just cut through it with the claws extending from her fingers.

"Well, some do but they never get any jobs." She scratched gently at the wall behind her, the action hidden away by the massive sleeves that she hid them in. "They don't say that they have internal rankings for Linked or certification, but they probably do. Rumour is that they have a hypercognitive that does it." There was a slight shock of distaste on Aaliyah's face, something that Jamie found herself agreeing with.

Jamie wanted to be away from the other girl, if she were being truthful with herself. It was something about the way that she had changed her tactics over the course of their hour of combat, the way that her skin had gone from almost being pierceable by Jamie's claws, to being like trying to find purchase on a smooth, wet stone.

Not to mention that Aaliyah just felt dangerous to be around, and the scary part was that Jamie could only just feel it. She thought herself adept at reading for dangerous people, and it'd almost never failed her, not since she was a child, but now her senses were ringing with a soft sound, almost indistinguishable from her team.

"Isn't that interesting…" Aaliyah mused, eyes narrowing while looking over Jamie's form, slowly drifting up and down her body as if she could see right through her clothes and at the monstrosity that laid beneath them. Jamie gulped, feeling a wave of shame come over her with an accompanying redness to her cheeks.

"I guess we'll have to see what we can pull off won't we, little lamb?" Aaliyah's voice rumbled lowly, before she turned away from her, walking to the locker rooms, and what Jamie could only assume was the bathrooms.

Jamie couldn't close her eyes as she watched the tall woman walk away from her, her eyes trailing her form as her body moved in a seductive saunter. It was only after the woman opened the door to the locker room and disappeared within, did she finally manage to snap her gaze away from her training partner.

Jamie raised a balled fist to her head, thumping her forehead with the ball of her palm multiple times. Just adding another reason to the list of why she really didn't want to be around the other girl.

---

​

"It seems that that the others are getting along." Ren said casually, leaning up against the wall next to the much taller Greek man, though both of them were relaxed despite their brutal fights. Ren had quickly shown himself to be more than a worthy matchup to Ajax's basic strength, the bare minimum that his axe would give him.

"Barely," Ajax responded just as casually, glancing over to Walter who was chatting in hushed tones with Julia, and Jamie who now stood alone, "though Mirah and June seem to be getting along just fine."

The two men summarily moved their gazes towards the two women who stood next to each other, not doing so much as moving, let alone speaking to one another. They seemed perfectly content to just wait out the allotted rest time in total silence with almost no interaction aside from the barest glances.

"It is better than a screaming match, yes?" He said, imitating a wise man's voice with a distinct Japanese accent that only shone through on a rare occasion. Ajax huffed with a slight chuckle, grinning at the green haired man.

"God yes. Thankfully, we haven't had any of those yet." Ren recoiled, as if Ajax had struck him.

"Wait, your team hasn't been in a screaming match yet?" The man looked scandalized, as if Ajax had insulted his mother. The Greek giant grinned widely, sensing the dramatics in the man's tone.

"We've had our fair share of tense moments, but they are heavy and quiet." Ren sighed, nodding his head and making the long green strands of grassy hair shake, the hair now leading all the way down to his waist now. The hair had actually been significantly reduced in size with a little bit of help from Ajax's surprisingly sharp axe.

"My group just screams at each other. When June gets involved?" He closed his eyes and scrunched his face, as if bracing himself for an explosion's shockwave screaming towards him. Ajax chuckled at the surprisingly expressive man.

"I bet it'll happen to me someday. Hopefully I won't be the one guilty of the crime." Both men laughed together, quickly finding a companionship between them. After a while, Ren pointed to Ajax's side, where the fireman's axe was holstered to his side.

"Why haven't you been using that in a fight so far?" Ajax thought for a moment, feeling at his side for the axe that had become just part of what he wore, more a part of his uniform than anything of any utility.

"I don't know." He stated frankly, easily pulling it out of its holster after unbuckling a strap and freeing it from its bonds. The axe almost hummed with pleasure, responding to an emotion inside of him that even Ajax wasn't quite cognizant of.

"Well, it's a part of your link, right? You wouldn't be carrying it around everywhere I've ever seen you unless it was." Ajax rose an eyebrow, trying to think if he'd ever noticed the green haired man walking by him at all, but drew a blank. Though, he discarded eh quiet suspicion and looked deeply at the slightly tattered red coating over the axe's head, feeling the surprising heft of the thing in his hands.

It was only really a hand axe, as long as his forearm maybe, but not long enough to be of any extreme use in combat. It was pretty heavy and had a cutting edge, and he had even learnt how to use it in some situations with Willem, though that training had been relatively few and far between.

"I could," Ajax said, feeling a more powerful thrum from his axe this time, "but I also feel like it'd be a little cheap. I don't see anyone else wearing a weapon." He gestured around the room, but Ren's disbelieving expression knocked him down a peg.

"I can grow crazy strong, tactile grass from my head; Jamie has claws; Julia has, like, a bit of everything; and June can break physics, technically." He barked out a single bubble of laughter, his eyebrows raised almost halfway up his forehead, "You're the only one of us playing without a weapon right now, Ajax."


A/N: Thank you to my 5-dollar Patron; Thaldor! A massive thanks to my 10-dollar Patrons; TheBreaker, Puppet424, and Dyson C.! An enormous thanks to my 15-dollar Patrons; Jokarun, and ytm! A gargantuan thanks to my 20-dollar Patrons; Andrew P., someguy, and Ryan U.!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

Patreon.com/Sarius

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 52: Countermeasures

The two women stood in almost absolute silence, something they were both comfortable with.

June was not much of a talker, not casually anyway. She wasn't particularly shy about holding back an opinion, but she held value in the words she said, thinking them out precisely instead of the inane jabber that Jamie was prone to.

June was also not much of a fighter, or at least she didn't enjoy it. It just so happened that her link was especially suited for combat, likely a product of the extremely hostile environment that she grew up in, and eventually Awakened in.

She was fast, ludicrously so. There were few in the building that could properly track her as she moved, let alone react in time for them to be at all safe from her admittedly weak blows. There were others that were technically faster than herself, though their own links came with caveats.

For example, Jeremy Baxter was technically faster than herself, at least in immediate bursts. It was astoundingly powerful for utility, and in combat it could be even more so, but he'd clearly neutered some of that lethality that his link was capable of in the fight with Ajax. The downfall, however, was that he had some limitation on using it, not being of the infinity power type.

Just about everyone that has needed to go up against Baxter's group had tried to find out what that limitation was. Because, simply, if they didn't, they would be crushed under the insanely fast flurry of blows he was capable of. When they graduated into weapons training, just about all of the teams there had sprinted to the first person they thought of.

Dean.

Dean was the best info link in Melbourne, probably, just by virtue of his versatility. Everyone knew that he would know any limitation that Baxter had almost instantly, it was one of the things you could count on about Dean. Dean knew everything, as far as everyone was concerned. But the trail ran dry when he told everyone; 'That information had been bought and paid for in full.'

It was code for, 'Baxter and his daddy paid for his secrets not to leak.' That, or someone managed to buy it out really quick, which was unlikely. But all of that still stayed irrelevant for June.

June was, by the majority of the AASAU's training metrics, the fastest person in training, and one of the fastest in Australia.

Where she lost in burst speed by a matter of milliseconds, she made up for being able to go for hours longer. She wasn't just fast, she was efficient. Which was why she had linktech businesses from all over the world, blowing up her email inbox at all hours. Once she got out of training, and gained the base level certifications, she'd immigrate to some other country and work one day a week for a few hours and have enough wealth to never need to worry about life ever again.

So, she was fast. One of the fastest non-fliers in the world, even, but that only left her more perplexed.

How had Mirah been able to react, then? How was it that the girl who couldn't possibly have done anything in the first half hour of June wiping the floor with her, could now dodge her first takedown? She didn't ask this, of course. June was pondering the question while she determined what exactly Mirah was capable of.

Realistically, there were hundreds of possibilities that Mirah could embody. There were so many Linked now, worldwide, that it was impossible to keep up with the new record that seemed to be broken every few months. The most notorious categories were speed, physical strength, and physical durability; three of the most common attributes that links effect.

June wasn't shy in admitting that she overly relied on her speed during combat, most of the time she'd even agree that she was actively lacking in other areas. But when it came down to it, June was exceptional at an extremely specific type of combat that was highly effective against some, and totally useless against others.

June could run fast, to the point where she could just about close any gap in practical combat so fast that it wasn't a realistic expectation that the majority would be able to react. Jeremy Baxter would be an exception here, with his burst speed technically being higher, and would likely allow him to play on a somewhat even footing with her, at least for a while.

But the majority of people, given that they aren't enhanced physically all that much, or that they require a trigger to activate their links, effectively cannot combat June. She moves too fast, able to trip them up and, if she had a knife, cut their throats an instant later.

It would be easy for her to take down a vast majority of Linked, especially if she were to be outfitted in linktech devices, let alone something that would allow her to kill with a touch.

But Mirah had slowly begun to do something somewhat spectacular, at least in June's eyes. First it started with the barest movement before June could reach her. Then it became a few centimetres of movement, but not enough to throw her off from tripping her. Then, one time, Mirah managed to move the leg that June was targeting far enough out of the way that she'd actually dodged June's attack.

It was almost unthinkable to June, but almost hilarious that the demure looking thing that stood beside her had been the first to truly dodge an attack from her, as she hadn't fought Jeremy Baxter yet, thankfully.

June's mental analysation was shattered when a neutral toned voice rang out clearly inside the smaller arena. "Everyone back to your designated areas, please. We will begin the fighting again once you have done so."

David's, or Osmium's, voice rang with that clear tone that June was almost entranced by. Her feet moved almost autonomously as the voice brought back memories of a time when she'd first been learning about Australia and its media. Though she'd never admit it, she'd been enamoured by the man, even going so far as to try and assume his image of stoic exactness.

Moments later, June was staring into Mirah's eyes once more. The two green disks standing out from the rest of her somewhat tame appearance, though she was pretty. June had seen her fair share of facial scars and deformities in her youth, so the scar through her lip barely even registered.

June flicked her mind into what their trainers had called 'combat mode', an almost meditative exercise that allowed you to assume combat readiness at any point in time. June was excellent at it.

The world slowed as June's highly advanced perception that came along with her extreme speed made the world move slower, like dripping molasses instead of a running stream. She could now feel the slow release of air from her lungs, lengthened by tens of times, though her eyes moved around the room faster than ever.

She narrowed her focus away from what was outside the painted box, to what was within, staring at the other girl and what she was doing. She had to be doing something, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense that she could combat anything that June could do. She certainly wasn't capable of physical speed or power, otherwise she'd have shown it by now.

June stared at the other girl as Osmium's voice began to speak the first syllable of 'Begin!', giving the other girl a moment to try and do something before she raced towards her at horrifying speed. However, this time, June managed to notice something.

She was always so preoccupied with how her opponent moved, an affectation of her own link being physically based, and the rest of her team being the same. So, it was when she looked to Mirah's eyes that she found the beginning to her answer.

The green disks were now cracked with little spider webs of faint gold, for only a moment. In the very next moment, Mirah blinked, and June made her attack with the opportunity. With how her eyes had changed the girl clearly had a link that influenced her perceptions somehow, maybe a hypercognitive if she was lucky.

June's body dropped down to the floor, almost breaking physics in however many different ways, then using a strange mixture of movement that you'd almost think was dancing that pushed her forwards with extreme speed while she stayed closest to the floor you could be without crawling.

June had a prodigious amount of control over her speed and direction, capable of changing directions at great speeds, but even she was somewhat limited by conventional thought. So when Mirah's body began to slide downwards, almost like she'd fainted, June started to realise that she was in a bad situation.

June's entire strategy was based on the preconception that barely anyone could possibly react in any constructive way to her attacks, even if they knew it was coming. But Mirah… Mirah had known. Mirah had taken an action so simple, so mundane within a fight, but it was the exact action that June couldn't defend against properly.

The gangly, seven-foot girl pumped the breaks as hard as she could, using every twist and turn she could as such a high speed to burn off the massive amounts of kinetic energy she was capable of generating, but there really wasn't much she could do.

Mirah's leg had whipped out at just the right angle to be unavoidable, right in the dead centre of her only real path forwards. It was a slow, torturous process for June, as she watched the leg draw nearer and nearer, knowing that here was no way to stop the collision.

Of course, once it did, even that wouldn't affect June that much. She hit the leg, sending it wide and her own body into a tumble before she regained control with the sudden decrease in speed. In the next moment, Mirah was on the ground, once again. Being able to move at speeds as fast as June could made recovering much easier and exploiting the moment of weakness much harder.

The Zimbabwean girl towered over Mirah; her own skin so much darker than her partner's that it made Mirah's light brown look stark white.

"You tripped me." The surprisingly soft voice June possessed slipped through her lips, though she let the unnecessary words slide. She was in too much shock that someone had managed to counteract her even a little to care.

Mirah's face turned upwards sharply to look at her, craning her neck to see the other girl's gaunt face. She nodded slightly before picking herself up off the ground and brushing her training wear off. They continued to look at each other for another few seconds, but there was no conversation to be had. This wasn't a conversation; it was a contest and a challenge.

Mirah might not be able to trump June's speed, but she could counteract it. And for June, even one counteraction was enough to show her that she needed more than just speed, otherwise someone who had prepared for her would be able to kill her in moments with a simple extended foot.

Mirah had won this round, in a practical setting. It was up to June to rectify that.

This marked the beginning of a true test of both their abilities, their links, and their minds. And it was all done in complete silence.

---

​

By this point, Guy had been well and truly punished for his 'crimes'.

The punishment had been rather tame in comparison to what Jeremy was truly capable of. Guy could only suppose that the man was too busy with his father and trying to manipulate the AASAU into letting their team rip the other team apart within full legality.

It was a longshot, even Guy could see that, but they were playing for a few steps down from that. It'd taken an age for them to come to some sort of conclusion on the matter, where Guy had been put into 'intensive training' for his poor performance at their little showdown with the other team.

Guy just sat in bed, having anchored himself to the soft fabric of the mattress and let himself fall into a comfortable heap of soft material—something that he'd been doing almost as soon as he found himself as a Linked one morning.

It was a weird dream to wake up from, to have a disembodied voice that seemed to only register to Guy's brain as the concept of durability itself, or maybe even material.

'Touch the world, and let it become you. With the world at your disposal, you can become unshakable, indestructible.'

The words leaked into his mind, just like they had countless times beforehand, and like they did every time he had a moment to sit and think. He returned to the sentence that he'd heard in his Awakening dream, to analyse and question it, to find some deeper meaning in it beyond what he already had.

He wondered if other Linked had their Awakening experiences float into their mind like his did. They must, otherwise they wouldn't be so taboo. If you could simply forget how you Awakened, only to have it be dragged up when someone asked you about it, then it probably wasn't that… eye opening of an experience.

Guy sighed deeply, knowing that he had to get out of bed, even if his mind protested the thought of unanchoring himself from the surface. He walked around his two-room apartment, mercifully separate from the others in his team, though he wasn't to be separate for long.

There was a knock at his door, lackadaisical and almost jolly. It was easy to tell who it was, just by their knock, and it was thankfully someone that Guy could actually deal with at least somewhat.

Guy quickly threw on some clothes before making it to the door and opening it with a nervous speed. There was a wave of rushing air as Slip burst past Guy with an explosive speed, the only visual indicator of his presence being the flash of the gaudy golden hoodie he wore, stretched out along with his body.

Guy sighed; though he was a little relieved that Slip wasn't here because Jeremy had asked him to be, a far worse possibility. He closed the door, then locked it as per Slip's usual request, then turning and walking in to sit down on his couch as Slip lounged in the big comfortable chair opposite in his branded beanie and oversized hoodie.

"G'day Guy. How's it been?" Slip asked, grinning with his somewhat yellowed though perfectly straight teeth, something that guy could envy the man for unreservedly.

"Come on, Larry. You're not here to check in on me, man." Guy said, even managing to be somewhat insulted that the man thought he could pull that one on Guy however many times without him learning at least one trick from the book.

"Ey," The man shrugged, pushing his har up as he did, "nothing wrong with some pleasantries." Guy rolled his eyes but locked with Slip's own and sighed deeper.

"Just tell me what's up." Slip chewed on his lip for a second, a flash of anger over coming him before he shoved a hand up into his beanie and scratched at the back of his head with a powerful sigh of his own.

"Look, you know the blonde bitch right? On that Undefined team, yeah?" Guy hesitantly nodded, and then Slip struggled for a moment longer before letting his info 'slip', "She's a fuckin' Flinn, man."


A/N: Sorry for the unintentional hiatus, things got rougher than I'd have ideally liked. Hopefully I can get back on track now. Thanks for bearing with me.

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 53: Tradeoff

Guy leant on the cushioned back of the couch, his head overheating from the information that had just found its way from Slip's lips and into his ears. He'd asked how he'd got the information in the first place, and even how he could know that it was true, and it checked out. As far as Guy could tell anyways.

"The Monarch's daughter is here?" He asked, equal parts befuddled and worried. Slip grunted lazily, acting the nonchalant information broker.

"Not just the Monarch's daughter either." He said, a small smile playing on his lips, "She was actually the Monarch for a while too."

"What?" Guy said, shaking his head with annoyance, "How's that even supposed to work! Wasn't he an info Linked? He built his empire on that shit." Slip shrugged his shoulders, his face quirking into an almost sleazy grin.

"Hey, how would I know? Maybe she got some of her link from her pops." Guy groaned.

Familial Linking. It's what the 'phenomena' was called. Guy, for what he lacked in his combat ability, made up for in his theoretical understanding of Linked, at least to a decent degree. Familial Linking was something that the media loved to report on, showing brothers with similar links, or even complementing links, and writing it off as if their links themselves were significantly altered because of their blood relation.

However, it was bogus, mostly. Statistically it was a wash, even if there were outliers. Those outliers could be put down to other factors though, and usually only occurred between siblings who were extremely close in age and development.

For example, the Seven Brothers that live in New Zealand. They are the most prominent example of this theory of Familial Linking, but they also prove the counter as well. At the time of their Awakening, they were incredibly young, exceptionally so for an Awakening to occur. They are seven twins who had almost never left each other's side throughout their entire life up until that point, and were subject to exactly the same stressors that eventually influenced their Awakening.

They were a perfect storm, and very few show as similar a likeness between their links as they do. And even then, they have commented that, while their links seem similar, they are quite different from each other in how they actually use them.

"Come on man!" Guy said in annoyance, the other man grinning, knowing that Guy hated having to constantly dispel the mystique around rumours like that, "We both know that Familial Linking is bogus."

Guy slouched in the comfortable confines of his couch, letting the pleasant material sooth his oncoming headache, "So why are you even telling me this, man. Not like I can help you. Go tell Jeremy or something!"

Slip tilted his head to the side slightly, grinning in his regular goofy fashion.

"What's a little bit of info between friends, hey?" Guy waved off the man, a little offended.

"What do you want?" Guy said, a little more forcefully this time. He didn't mind Slip, the guy was even nice sometimes, but he wasn't Guy's friend, and never would be. Slip was a different breed, from a different part of the world. He was someone that constantly ran a cost benefit analysis in his head, and if the costs began to outweigh the benefits, he'd immediately cut ties.

Such was the path of succeeding in the world of gangs. There was no room for compassion.

"Fine." Slip said, his face dulling down to a more neutral position, "Look, you might be the one that Jeremy has his eye on all the time, but really, he doesn't give a flying fuck what you do. He doesn't care what you're up to, just if he can give himself any reason to punish you for it."

Guy ground his molars together, pulling a surprising amount of definition out of his somewhat pudgy jawline. Guy had wondered how he was somehow maintaining the excess weight when it seemed so easy for the other trainees to lose massive amounts so easily, but he'd come to find that it was just another type of torture that Jeremy had decided to subject him to. By increasing the portion of the energy jelly that they had to consume to not starve their relatively newly Awakened bodies, Jeremy had managed to keep Guy consuming enough to maintain the pudge he'd come into the AASAU with.

"Your point?" Guy said, unamused by the man's obvious observations.

"Well," he said, drawing out the word slightly at the end, "he won't exactly notice if you go and… introduce yourself." Guy almost leapt out of the couch, immediately pacing around the room, waving his hands around as he spoke quickly.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" He said loudly, almost yelling at the other man, "No way, no fucking way, are you getting me to do that shit. You're seriously asking me to go and meet with an ex-druglord who ruler over an empire large enough that I knew about it in the upper districts? Are you insane?"

Slip grinned widely, holding up and hand and shaking it imperiously, "I wouldn't say an empire, a small kingdom at best."

"You think that changes anything?" He squawked, waving a hand dangerously close to Slip's face, "If she ran that for even a day, then she probably ordered someone's death, Larry! Do you remember how the Monarch and his little empire fell?"

The pudgy boy, while unassuming and quiet most of the time, was actually pretty imposing when he wanted to be. Maybe it was because Slip was quietly afraid of his link, with it having the possibility to make his own totally useless, or maybe it was the hair and the eyes.

Slip had only seen the man once in his time with Rightful Order, hanging around Jeremy and subtly earning himself more power, but seeing that man once had engrained the image of him in his mind. The curly brown hair and the bright blue eyes. Something that would lend the possessor a modicum of pleasantness, or even innocence. But to those that knew, who has seen him, they found themselves checking those that wore those features twice, just in case.

Slip knew that was the real reason that he kept slightly upping Guy's energy intake. Just in case the pudgy boy in front of them earned himself the sharp, intense features that they feared lay beneath the layer of fat they preserved.

"Of course I do, idiot." Slip snarled slightly, annoyed with his wandering thoughts, "We all fuckin' know, 'cause it was my, and their people that died. So shut your pie hole and listen!" The cutting words made Guy grimace, realising that he'd stepped on a landmine, though he couldn't quite make himself feel all that apologetic.

"Honesty here, I can't stand to be in the same room as her." Slip shrugged, trying to bottle the small wave of emotions that arose as he thought about his extended limbs wrapping around her neck and suffocating her, "I'll end up fuckin' killing her, you understand?"

Guy sighed, running a hand through his tight curls, desperately trying to think of a way to deescalate this mess of a situation.

"Come on man, she wasn't the one who–" Guy's words were cut off with a bang, Slip's hand coming down on the coffee table with all the force he could muster with the power his extended arm could afford him, breaking off part of the table's side.

"I don't give a flying fuck if it was her fault or not, Guy." Slip breathed slowly for a moment, carefully controlling the pace of his breathing and therefore controlling his rage, "The point is, if I end up in a room with her, or even talking to her, I'll kill her before the day is out. You understand?"

The words out of Slip's mouth were so counter to his usual lackadaisical attitude that they would be jarring to anyone that only knew him tangentially. Guy, though, is likely the person who knew the 'real' Slip the most, however unpleasant it could be.

"Fine, fine. This is great and all," Guy flicked his hand out with wry questioning, "but what the hell am I supposed to do with this, Larry?" Slip growled, hating that Guy was pushing his buttons by using his real name. Not even Jeremy used his real name, and Guy was the only one that used it instead of Slip.

"You're gonna go and talk to her and get information from her. She promised me information when I had her bound, and I want to call in on it. And no," he said quickly, already fending off the question he could see arising in Guy's eyes, "I don't give a shit what Jeremy thinks. He's too preoccupied with his stupid grudge match to see that we should have been building ties this whole time."

Guy waited for Slip to continue, specifically about why they should be building ties with the other team, exactly, but he didn't seem forthcoming with that nugget of wisdom.

"Fuck, man." Guy groaned, rubbing at his eyes furiously. "I'm the counter opposite of what you want here. I'm not good at this shit, I can't do the whole interrogator negotiator thing."

"And you don't need to. You're the one going exactly because you seem the most harmless." Slip let the other man take in the statement before continuing, "I want you to figure out what they're up to. I want to know what they want to do after this mess." He waved a hand around to the building that surrounded them, a common enough feeling after having been in the place for a few months now, coming close to the end of their training. Guy knew that he'd be woefully undertrained in comparison to the rest of his team, and he was severely lacking in combat because of it, but he didn't care.

In fact, the more useless he was, the more likely he was to survive the predicament. He didn't want to do this. If he were caught out by Jeremy or, more terrifyingly, Terrence, he'd be physically tortured at the minimum. At the maximum?

Well, then word would be sent up the chain of command, and that was more terrifying than any physical torture that Jeremy or Terence could ever threaten him with.

"And if I don't?" Guy asked, his eyes looking to the other man like pools of disappointment. Slip pulled one of the corners of his lips to the side, giving him an apologetic expression that Guy could barely be sure was genuine.

"Sorry mate. I'll have to tell Jeremy about your Mum."

Guy went cold inside his gut, letting the entirety of his abdomen freeze over until he felt nothing. He let all disappointment and any sadness wash away to revel a morosely stagnant expression, letting his eyes bore into the other man's.

"Fine then." He said coldly, letting the temperature of his gut leak up through his throat and out his mouth, "Get the fuck out of my room. If you want anything, you will call me. If you come into my room ever again, I swear to fucking God…"

He let the words trail off, staring the other man dead in his eyes. Guy was hardly the man to be able to make threats, lacking in any real confidence. But in this situation, he was motivated to do so with the cold that slowly spread outwards from his gut as he let the inevitable betrayal of any trust he'd built between him and the other man die.

Slip nodded slightly, not allowing Guy to pull a reaction out of him. He stood from his place in the large chair, striding out of the room without a single word, anything more being an unnecessary and, frankly, dangerous insult to the other Linked.

Slip closed the door behind him gently, and hearing the lock click a moment later from the other side, almost making him chuckle with just how fitting the action was for the situation.

As he walked down the corridor, down to his own room, he felt himself shifting uncomfortably within his own clothes, quickly becoming more and more uncomfortable with every step he took. As soon as he entered his own room, he started stripping out of his clothes in a bizarre curiosity for what was making him feel like he was being pricked with a dozen needles.

It was when he managed to get his shirt off that he realised what'd caused him the discomfort.

He was sweating. A cold sweat had made it through his skin, covering the surface of it in a slight glistening sheen, evidence of something that Slip hadn't even realised himself. He gulped, finding that his throat was as dry as a desert, prompting him to reach for his fridge and pulling out a beer, even as early in the morning as it was.

He stripped himself down to his boxer shorts, popping the top of the beer bottle open easily after he looped a stretched finger underneath the cap and pulled, letting him slump down in his own chair and taking a deep swallow of the awful beer he'd liked since he was fourteen.

Though the familiar taste didn't wash out the sour one already in his mouth as he stared at the blank television in front of him.

"Fucking hell." He said to himself, almost a murmur as he downed more of the drink. "Maybe he really did inherit more from that fuckin' psychopath than I thought."

Slip didn't quite want to admit it, though it was undeniable now. Guy's eyes, he could have sworn that he saw real murder in them. Not the fake shit that so many kids tried to pull as an intimidation tactic. Guy didn't need that; he didn't even try to intimidate with it.

He didn't want to admit that he might have just missed a train he'd wanted to be on. An unlikely, ramshackle carriage that looked unimpressive, but might very well end up going a whole lot further than he expected.

He could only hope that, if that train continued to go, their tracks might intersect once again.

Slip gulped down his bear heavily again, trying to erase the vision of two men overlapping within his mind, and just how terrifying the resemblance was. If only it were so easy to rid himself of such a mortifying thought.


A/N: Hope you all enjoy this chapter, and are having great days!

If you want to support me, and receive up to 90 total chapters in advance, check out my Patreon!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 54: Overanalysis

Aaliyah grumbled as she stretched her body out carefully, trying to ease her sore muscles into a state of calm comfort.

They were stubborn, however, deciding instead to send tight pain arcing across her back and sides as she continued with her stretching, in the vain hope that it might help the more she did it. Aaliyah slumped back into the semi comfortable position that she'd found, lying in bed, and using her laptop as she slowly recovered from the day's intense training.

There weren't any real blemishes on her skin, other than the dots of colour that appeared and disappeared like they normally did when she let her mind be at ease. Solid colours were harder to manufacture, outside of moments where she genuinely felt the emotion, but smatterings of colours were easy, even if they had no discernible effect on herself or those around her.

Thankfully, she'd escaped injury with her impressive toughness and healing rate. Aaliyah's training partner was a monster in combat, far better than she was technically in almost every way, and able to match up with Aaliyah's own physical power pretty well, though she didn't have the healing rate that Aaliyah boasted, especially not if she was able to manufacture happiness, however rare an emotion it was for her.

Aaliyah had a slight edge on the other girl in pure brawn and could increase that gap at the cost of stability if she absolutely had to, but Aaliyah quite liked staying in control. All of this told Aaliyah one, particularly important, thing.

She wasn't that good in a fight.

She had the brawn, the brains, the healing, and a little assortment of other emotions she could try and use to aide her, but she couldn't match the other girl. Not even close.

Jamie King, the full name that Aaliyah had figured out after some research, was the daughter to a fairly wealthy businessman with less than moral implications. He'd been imprisoned sometime around Jamie's mid teenage years and died a few years later in prison to inmate conflict, supposedly. His rap sheet was a mile long, with anything from sexual harassment, to aiding in a kidnapping, to far, far worse. Aaliyah was smart enough to see what's made the girl Awaken from a mile away, having met her in person as well.

Damaged as she might be, though only as much as the next Linked, Jamie King was good in a fight.

Aaliyah couldn't be sure if it was a natural inclination, or a part of her link itself, but the girl was scary to go up against. She was strong, but also precise; she was fast, but also flexible; she had long reach, and she knew how to use it. She was everything Aaliyah was and more, at least in the physical realm.

Aaliyah could let go of her inhibitions, let go of the trust that she used to counteract her anger, let herself fall into that anger, and then rage, and become a raving beast that would crush the other girl in the blink of an eye.

But that wasn't really winning. There was no thought or control, no effort on her part. It was a cheat code, one that ended with Aaliyah turning into snowball of rage rolling down a mountain at a hundred clicks an hour. She was more than sure that Willem could stop her, the man hiding more than a little strength, and Osmium could stop her as well. Hell, even Ajax might be able to stop her if his axe wanted to play ball, but it didn't change the reality of the control she'd be giving up.

I was tempting, sometimes. Anger was like that, only breading more of itself until you really go haywire, but Aaliyah didn't have that luxury. She couldn't let herself go out of control every time she needed some extra power to defeat an enemy. It was a great way to go truly berserk, and, well…

It wasn't very 'heroic' either.

Aaliyah scowled at her own thoughts, trying to push the stupid line from her mind. Her? A capital 'H' Hero? It was just about as dumb an idea as she could think up, what with her past of very un-heroic actions. She was getting caught up in the atmosphere that was building around the team, and she couldn't even deny that it was happening.

They were all working towards a goal, joining together in a single-minded focus. Sure, they all had their own reasons for doing so, and some of those reasons aren't as pure as you'd like, but they were all on the same page. It was almost mystical to Aaliyah, how it'd happened before her eyes and how she'd missed it.

Mirah. It was Mirah all along.

They all had their roles in the team, and they were becoming more defined as they actually began to work together. No role was set in stone, of course, but there was an underlying, almost spiritual, aspect to it that made the team actually stick in Aaliyah's mind as something more than a steppingstone.

Ajax was the head of the dragon. He was their leader, the man who pointed in a direction, and they walked in it to follow. Aaliyah wanted so desperately to be in that position herself, to hold that power, but she knew that if she did that, it would only devolve into a system created to benefit her. She didn't trust herself with the power that Ajax was sometimes able to command over others, or the confidence that he garnered by his actions.

Walter, well, he was the mind of it. Walter was a whole lot smarter than the team had been giving him credit for so far. It was a quiet intelligence, something that really only stood out when he was confident enough to blather on about what he was interested in. But after a good handful of lectures with Tracker, learning about the links and all their strange caveats, Aaliyah had realised that Walter was quickly becoming a human encyclopedia of Linked knowledge. Sure, he was idealistic to a definite fault, but he was smart, and Aaliyah could sometimes swear that the boy was gaining information on Linked at a rate that she couldn't match.

As for herself, Aaliyah wasn't totally sure. Sometimes it just took an outside eye to really nail down exactly where you stood within a group, but Aaliyah was fairly sure she knew what was up.

Aaliyah was the skin and bones of the dragon. The head had direction, the mind had its thoughts and motives, but the skin was what protected it from the journey it embarked on, the bones granting it stability on unstable surfaces. Aaliyah wasn't so arrogant as to really believe that she was the protector of the team, but she did protect them in a different way. Maybe you could even say that she was the skull, protecting the mind from damage.

The team couldn't afford to wade in the dark swamps that she had throughout her life. Walter's mind would crack as he grappled with the vileness of what lived in the water. Ajax would lose his direction, finding himself submerged in murky water and unable to tell up from down.

Aaliyah, however, had lived in those swamps. She'd thrived in them and was broken because of it. She was the one who could submerge herself into those waters and come back, unscathed, with a ferry to let them stand atop it, rather than risk the depths.

So, that left Mirah.

Who was she to the team? The quiet girl who could sometimes speak so little that Aaliyah would forget that she was there at all. The once malnourished stick of a woman with a scar across her face, to protect herself from those that might prey on her in the dark streets she'd lived within.

Aaliyah had thought the same, thinking her inconsequential to the makeup of it. But when they were as close to falling apart as they had ever been, only days after their first match with Baxter's team, it was Mirah who brought it all together.

Mirah was the heart. She didn't beat warmly, or with kindness and compassion—that was more Ajax's, or even Walter's, thing. Instead, she beat with an inviolable determination. Maybe it was because she'd never had her expectations of the world be violated, aside from the small part of it that she'd lived in. She'd existed in the dark swamp, observing as many horrors as she could stomach, but now she'd found herself thrust into a different world entirely.

And to her, it didn't make sense.

Mirah had never vocalised it, but Aaliyah had managed to pick up on it a few times, her confusion with the way that the world worked, or why people thought certain ways. Briefly, Mirah had been wrapped up in how others thought, maybe after she learned of Suicide and the fall of the Enforcers in the States. But she'd washed herself of the generational traumas that she'd been momentarily consumed by, leaving her with something more important than the fear they all held deep inside of themselves, subconsciously.

She'd found hope, or at least a version of it. Maybe it was naive, or self-destructive, or even downright laughable. But it was undeniable. It was not built on morality, or on injustice, or even on revenge for what had once happened to her, something that Ajax had only ever teased information about during training, being too tight lipped with other's secrets.

It was built on that same sense of wrongness that Mirah found herself embroiled in, each and every day in this new world. And just by being near her, by seeing how she reacted to the world around her, Aaliyah had begun see the world that way as well.

Why does every Linked seem to ally with the known evils, or create their own, even when they have the power to change it? Why do they let the world fall into ruin if there is always a Linked somewhere that can counter another Linked? Why the bureaucracy and the boot licking, when you can find a Linked who would want nothing more than to bring their home peace?

Where did all the Heroes go?

Aaliyah hated it, to have those thoughts pop into her head like they had been lately. She knew that it was the team's influence, the mere atmosphere itself bringing the questions that a three-year-old might ask their parent to the forefront of her mind.

They kept her awake at night now, swirling around her head as she desperately tried to understand the world she'd found herself in, battling against the deep-seated dread that the barest question brought with it.

Mirah was the heart, and she beat; softly and forever, unyielding and incorruptible. Enough to make the others think, to view the world from a blank page, bereft of the stains that life had covered theirs with.

She was the lynchpin in their minds. The compass and the diviner, all rolled into one. Even Ajax checked to make sure that he himself was pointed in the right direction.

Aaliyah tried to stretch out her muscles again, the pain from her sore flesh zapping across her form as she did so. However, her stretch was interrupted with a soft knock on the door, slightly different from the ones she'd grown to expect.

She lowered herself from her stretch slowly, turning off her laptop and letting it quickly go through it's cleaning sequence while she rose from the bed and made her way out of her bedroom and towards the door.

The walk to the door wasn't hesitant, so much as analytical. Aaliyah tried to pull information from anything she could; the shadow underneath the door, the sounds that they made as they shifted in place ever so slightly. Aaliyah approached the door, looking through the small peephole that had come installed in it for whatever reason, seeing an all too familiar face on the other end.

Aaliyah sighed heavily, letting her head droop down to the floor as she could feel the incoming conversation. She opened the door after gathering herself for a moment, beginning to speak before the man had a chance to even open his mouth.

"Guy Baker." Aaliyah said, announcing that she knew the boy's name already, "I can't say that I was expecting you." The man, standing almost half a foot shorter than herself, swallowed his words and just nodded.

She'd expected him to be more… nervous. She'd managed to contact the primary and high school that he went to before all of this, and his teacher report cards always mentioned him being overly nervous and possibly suffering from anxiety symptoms in the classroom. It wasn't Aaliyah's most ethical phone call, when she'd asked for that information as she posed as his mother, but the front desk of both schools had been unusually helpful. At least compared to the more restrictive schools that Baxter and Nguyen had attended, which might as well have been info security iron fortresses.

"I wish I could be anywhere else." He replied eventually, his blue eyes darting up to meet Aaliyah's own hazel eyes. Aaliyah had expected him to be at least a little nervous.

But he was cold, his eyes holding little in the way of emotion. It wasn't the cruel coldness that she'd seen on too many men's faces, but a level deeper than even that. It was calculating, direct, and far too reminiscent of the far more powerful men that stood behind the cruel idiots.

Aaliyah nodded, guiding the pudgy boy into her living room, and closing the door behind him, letting old skills she'd long since let atrophy come back to the surface. She'd need them, if she was at all right about him from his expression. She knew one thing, though.

She'd missed something when she'd gone through his history. Those eyes and that simple school reports didn't match up.

She was now playing at a disadvantage, and the match had barely even begun.


A/N: Here's another chapter! Hope you're all doing well, especially with highschool wrapping up for all the Americans.

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 55: Monarch

Aaliyah sat at their requisite table, idly chewing on a piece of perfectly toasted bread, scrunching her face in thought. The rest of her team were surrounding her, chatting about their training and what they were trying to work on in their quest to beat the members of the other team.

Ajax had been the one to find himself as most competitive with the other team, his power having increased magnificently as soon as he'd implemented one, amazingly simple thing. Actually using his axe. The rest of the team hadn't even bothered to be happy for the man when he'd told them why he was doing so much better. It wasn't as if Ajax was stupid, just restrictive and cautious when it actually came to drawing from that power that the axe could give him.

Walter had been faring better as he got acclimated to the amorphous blob that was Julia, though he still found it extraordinarily difficult to resist his mind's natural inclination to try and subvert the sound that Julia used to throw him off. He had explained it like the brain had to figure out a new equation ever time that Julia changed to delay, so it was almost nauseating to experience. Once he'd been able to ignore the changes in sound and rely entirely off of eyesight, he fared a little better until she started to subvert that as well. Amorphous blob bending the mind with just what she was capable of in movement.

Mirah, however, was most surprising to Aaliyah. She wasn't even close to being able to fight hand to hand with the massively tall Nigerian woman, of which Aaliyah had found only a few public records on and an old social media account that she had to manually translate. But Mirah's performance against the other girl was impressive, even if there was a distinct lack in the usage of her pseudo telekinetic abilities. She was able to dodge blows before they were thrown, and that same principle even applied to the girl who could move as fast as damn lightning, enough to terrify Aaliyah on occasion with a flash of movement out of the corner of her own eye.

Aaliyah was doing fine, but it was all simply learning to fight against a foe who was just as strong, and far more skilled than herself. It was, however, increasing her interest in just what her other emotions might do for her, if she could reproduce them in combat so easily. For her to switch powersets to give herself a strategic advantage against her opponent, then she'd be the next 'swiss army knife' Linked, something that was extremely valuable and highly sought after.

But Aaliyah could care less about that right now, even with how she'd been pummelled into the ground by Jamie's clawed hands and scaled body not twenty minutes earlier. Right now, her mind was awhirl with the information she'd gained the night before, something that had even stopped her from sleeping with the swirling thoughts.

It wasn't a grand revelation or anything so astounding, but enough to make her hate the world just a little more.

"Aaliyah." Ajax's voice was the one to cut through the hubbub of her mind, pulling her back to the present with a soft, but firm tone, "Something is bothering you."

She looked up to the man, almost a half-foot taller than her, and she was already six foot tall, dwarfing the majority of men and women even in Australia. Even as he sat, he looked so much bigger than he was even then. Next to June he looked short, but it also made his already impressive muscles even more prominent. As he idly pulled his long hair back into a bun, focusing on her completely, letting the rest of the group do the same, she could swear that she saw concern in his powerful features and dark eyebrows.

'Hah, concern for little old me.' She thought sarcastically before running a hand through her own blonde locks, pulling them over her shoulder and leaning back in the chair as she felt the centre of attention shift towards here properly.

"I had a visitor last night." She began, trying her best to say the world flatly and without the sarcastic or mockingly theatrical edge she fell into so easily when she wasn't playing a character. Just good old, broken Aaliyah.

"Baxter's team?" Walter said, catching on instantly, almost surprising the rest of the group with just how snappy his response had been. The fairly slim Vietnamese boy tried not to shy away from the looks, instead choosing to elucidate the others to how he'd picked out the answer so fight.

"I've been chatting with Rich a lot recently, trying to get a good idea of, uh," he waved his hand around the place, "all of what we've been missing. Apparently you're not really expected to interact with the other trainees for a few months at least, not until combat training starts, so we're behind big time—"

"And?" Mirah said, stopping the boy from falling down a rabbit hole with a sharp tug on the reins, though Walt just jolted as if the train he was riding clicked back onto the rails. Mirah was good at that.

"And," he said slowly, "Slip has a bit of a reputation of doing that sort of thing. That's what they call the kid in the golden hoodie, anyways." The others nodded their heads slowly, following along with Walter's pedestrian explanation, though Aaliyah snorted.

"Five points for the quick deduction, two for guessing right on who wanted the information, but that's all you're getting." Walt turned back, less annoyed by the random scoring he'd received, and more interested in what he'd gotten 'wrong'. Aaliyah shrugged nonchalantly and continued on, "Guy Baker showed up on my doorstep last night."

Something that only confused them more.

"Uh, Guy is the one that Mirah fought, right? The one that could change his skin into what he stood on, I think." Walter questioned hesitantly, and Aaliyah confirmed, turning her own questioning gaze towards Mirah.

"He was indeed." She said mysteriously, "And according to you, Mirah, he also wasn't a predator."

She wasn't doing so much as threatening her team member. Aaliyah found it difficult to do that to someone that sometimes felt so out of this world, almost alien. But it was a question, or even a challenge, to what the girl had felt between her and that man that could have possibly made her think that he wasn't a predator of some sort.

"He is not." Mirah intoned quietly after a long moment of thought, prompting the two boys at the table to covertly look around the cafeteria to see if they could find the boy's pudgy form, one they'd never really taken any particular interest in, not over someone far more… intimidating than Baxter or his muscled Asian bodyguard.

"You say that," Aaliyah said as she snatched up a packet of sugar from the middle of the table, ripping it open and pouring it into her now lukewarm drink, "but when he talked to me last night, I could swear he was about to kill someone." The intensity between the two girls was almost palpable, though there was one in the group that had shown that he sometimes had difficulties reading atmospheres.

"Yeah right, how would you know wha–" Walter said, snorting amusedly before he found the rest of the team's eyes focused in in him. Walt grimace heavily, cringing at his own knee-jerk response, beating himself over the head mentally for the stupid idea his brain had spawned.

"When I saw him," Mirah said, ignoring Walter's blunder, "I knew that he wasn't here because he wanted to be." The explanation was simple, and getting more out of Mirah was difficult; with her sometimes limited vocabulary, and terrible communication skills. Sometimes it was just easier to take the words at face value.

"And maybe you're right." Aaliyah shrugged heavily, "But he showed up to talk on behalf of Slip last night, and if you'd told me that he was a genuine RO member, I wouldn't have even questioned it."

"Anyway," Ajax interjected hastily, choosing to push the conversation away from a potential argument, "that doesn't matter right now. What matters is what you found out, and what you gave them."

Ajax, surprisingly, had been the one to realise that it was a deal, and that Aaliyah would have had to give up information on her own team to get some on others. The other two had it click for them next, with Walter's eyes going wide with a horrified betrayal.

"You sold us out?" He hissed harshly, the look of disgust on his face almost offensive if Aaliyah knew that she wouldn't feel just as violated had he done it to her.

"Yes, I sold some of our information for their own information." The others at the table, even Ajax and Mirah, have her a hard look, unsure and slightly hurt. Aaliyah forced a harsh sigh from her throat scratching her fingers through her hair and letting it fall into its natural middle part. "Look, I know that sounds bad—"

"Really bad." Walter said, voice strained with some anger, and she glared at him for interrupting, only continuing after Walter twisted his lip in distaste for a moment and restraining himself.

"But it was necessary. Our information isn't valuable, not as much as theirs is, and theirs is far more valuable to us than you seem to think."

"It's not valuable to you!" Walter hissed, his voice cracking with the effort of restraining the yell he so desperately wanted to let loose. "You're giving Righteous Order information about me, and I have parents who have to work with them!"

Aaliyah clenched her jaw angrily, even if she could see his point. Well, she could more than see his point. She knew his point back to front, and she also knew what was really happening.

Walt began to stand from his seat at the table, ready to storm off and go burn off some energy, quite literally. You'd have thought that it'd be Ajax to stop him, to try and keep the team together and talk through the situation with a level head, and Aaliyah was sure he would have, if she hadn't called out to him first.

"Walt!" She said insistently, loud enough that it turned a few heads in their direction, before they rolled their eyes at what they'd have probably believed was just another fight between a new team. Walter turned back towards her, his face a mask of pure anger and betrayal that she felt painfully pierce into her chest.

'Goddamn it, Aaliyah. You're losing your touch.' She reprimanded herself as she swallowed against the pang of sadness that washed over her at the boy's rage fuelled look, an expression that she'd been on the receiving end of too many times to count. A look that she thought that she'd completely numbed herself too. A look that somehow managed to cut past any defence she had and slice through the muscled walls of her heart.

"Walt, you want to sit down." She commanded, her voice almost defensively angry before tapering off at the end as she flicked her eyes away from the man, looking to her hands at the table, "… please."

The words were almost painful to say, and the grey colour that floated to the surface of her skin only made her more uncomfortable with the eyes of the group on her. She remembered the grey dots, the ones that had once allowed Mirah to remember Aaliyah's own memories, and she hated that it was appearing now, of all places. She tried to push it down, but even as Walter glared at her heatedly, taking the few steps back to the table and sitting back down heavily.

"What, then?" He said, crossing his arms in a surprisingly intimidating fashion for the boy that she could have sworn was just an excitable puppy made human. She sighed, her breath filled with pure exasperation, her hand roughly rubbing against the skin of her forehead.

"I'm so sorry Walt." Aaliyah began, and everyone at the table froze at her tone. It was true, genuine sadness, something that was so stark when coming from Aaliyah's mouth that even Aaliyah was a little surprised that she felt as deeply sad as she did. She'd thought that she'd lost that part of herself, her ability to express any real, genuine emotions past a select handful. Certainly not any that made her vulnerable.

She struggled to make eye contact with the man, her body covered in goosebumps from the wave of adrenalin as she realised that she was being vulnerable in front of the team, in a public place. But despite the bravado she tried to summon, she couldn't stop her expression from shaking.

"They already know about your parents, Walt. They always did." She placed her white knuckled grip against her brow, obscuring her face from view as she kneaded the thin skin with a painful amount of force.

"Who do you think is helping Baxter push forwards our training?"

Aaliyah watched on in with a terrible dread in her stomach as Walter's face went from angrier that he had likely ever been, to that heart wrenching look of horror on his face, his mouth falling agape as the light in his eyes dulled slightly as reality set in. A blanket of real danger, genuine danger, fell over the group as they slowly came to understand just terrifying their lives were going to be.

Aaliyah, however, was the one who could walk in the swamps of the darkness, sullying herself so that the others could remain clean, even if she returned with information that destroyed their hearts ever so slightly. Aaliyah let her jaw clench and her eyes close as she faced her own secret fear, realising that she had no choice but to tell them just why she could brave the darkness.

"I think…" Aaliyah said, the first to break the horrid stillness, her mouth trembling as she clenched her heart and forced it to steel itself against her vulnerability. She stood up straight, finding the warm orange of willpower on her skin, washing over her and the rest of the group as their minds focused and pulled themselves into a desperate intensity.

"I think it's time we talked. About us, about our histories, our Awakenings." She trailed off for a second, looking from Mirah to Ajax, then finally letting her eyes rest on Walter's distraught expression.

"About me." She finalized, letting the warm amber cover her skin even more completely, even glowing slightly as she resolved herself to the words she'd shied away from for years, the terrible name that had haunted her, and would haunt her, for the rest of her life.

"My name… is Aaliyah Flinn." She said finally, her words burning with a quivering shame, "And I was the Monarch."


A/N: Heya, hope you've all been enjoying the chapters since I've been posting more regularly again. I've been hit by a lot of lethargy and exhaustion recently, probably due to a viral infection of some sort. It's been… rough. I'm glad I can keep on writing though, at least a little.

On another somewhat sad note, my Patreon has been suffering quite a bit. Maybe just some bad luck plus the somewhat forced extended leave of absence. I'm hoping that I can get it back to where it was soon enough, but if you'd like to help out in general, a comment would work wonders.

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 56: Change in Attitude

"They're fighting." Chef signed in his heavily abridged version of sign language that only he and his closest friend could really decipher.

The shorter man gave Chef a long, suffering look, using one of his extended arms to wipe at his forehead as he looked around at the rest of the kitchen hands who were working away at their orders. He forced his hands into action, not quite as quick as Chef was capable of, but fast nonetheless.

"Man, they're always fighting! All the new teams fight like crazy; some even go physical. You know that!" Chef's elegant jaw clenched as he grimaced, almost as if he were in actual pain.

"No, this is serious. Deathly serious." The shorter man was ready to fire back with any number of flippant responses before he saw the other man's face. With his own grimace, he groaned loud enough that some of the other employees turned to look at him.

"What do we even do about that? We can't do shit!" He gestured with his inhumanly long arms, coming just shy of knocking a plate off of a table in the process, though neither of the men cared to point it out. Chef looked around the room, his tightly woven bun barely moving even as his head whipped from side to side, before returning with pleading eyes.

"Milkshakes?"

---

​

"They're fighting" Ren pointed out subtly as his own team sat at their table, eating the same meals that they had for months at this point. It seems that they had all fallen into a habit with food, and they almost never deviated, except for dinners. Today, Julia had come to sit with them during the lunch period, in between their training.

It was something that Ren had been surprised by, but he didn't say that of course. Julia's confidence was a fragile thing, and a poorly thought-out comment could easily send her back into her reclusive tendencies. It wasn't hard to guess why that might be, especially with the fallout from the Baxter incident as a whole.

"No shit, Sherlock." Jamie mumbled through her food as she watched Walter jump up from his chair, his warm skin almost burning red with actual anger. Jamie was not the greatest at reading someone's emotions, but she was good enough to tell that Aaliyah had said something that had really gotten to the rest of the team. Not that it surprised Jamie, the only one in her own team that has had to deal with the woman for any length of time.

She was a poker and prodder, socially, and it could be surprisingly difficult to keep her mouth shut around her. She was also pretty good at getting under Jamie's skin—or scales, she supposed—but it was always a subtle art for Aaliyah, making Jamie mad but not too mad. Too many were great at taunting people into actual anger and getting their asses beat when they pulled a bunch of power out of nowhere.

Julia's vision was stuck on Ajax, which had been embarrassingly common over the course of the day before. She wasn't usually one to swoon over someone so hard, maybe when she was in primary school, but after that first, almost obsessive, love she found herself difficult to attach the idea of romance to someone. But Ajax felt different, and maybe that was why it actually pained her to see the expression of hurt on his face.

She wanted to help, somehow, but it was an internal argument between teammates. Other teams stepping in, or trying to mediate, usually had disastrous effects, so the large majority of trainees just left the new team on the block alone for as long as possible. Let them acclimatize and figure out what their team looks like.

"Should we…?" Her voice rang out with its crystalline quality, something she'd started feeling more pride in once she started singing, like Ajax had suggested. There was a big difference between her singing, and her replicating sound and playing it back. Different parts of her brain, or whatever she had after her morph.

"No." June's voice whispered, and while she wasn't the leader of the group, everyone listened. Ren was making to elaborate, the de-facto translator for the softly spoken woman, but June did away with the intermediary in a surprisingly spiel of words.

"There is something else going on, and Aaliyah is revealing it. This is important." They looked back to the table and realised that June was right. Walter had sat back down in his seat and, after only a few short words, his face warped into a dark mask that Julia could barely force herself to look at.

Julia tried her hardest to keep her curiosity to herself, but when your entire link, and even your body structure itself, is built around the understanding and replication of sound, curiosity quickly led to her hearing every word that was said within the room. The words said only moments before were still present enough to hear their reverberations, and Julia's mind expertly reversed engineered them into the words that Aaliyah had said. A blessing and a curse; with the ability to almost rewind a recording to a few moments before, Julia was able to catch sounds and words that she immediately wished that she'd never heard.

Her purple body constricted into a more compact, dark ball, even as her mind listened in on their conversation further.

The rest of the team noticed immediately, and Julia's reaction was enough to tell them that it was way worse than just a fight. June was right, and even she felt prickles of worry at the back of her mind, her eyes set on the partner that she'd been training with for at least ten hours at this point.

She liked Mirah. They both weren't talkative, and there was no real camaraderie or intrigue between them. In fact, their interest in each other was so minimal that it reduced how much June herself took interest in her own past. With Mirah there was no subterfuge, or any real goal from a social perspective. Their relationship was as simple as possible, pure in its ultimate simplicity.

To learn, to fight, to win, to grow. There was no other motive.

Yet June could see it in the other woman's piercing green eyes. It wasn't fear, or even anger. It was a judgement, her mind a scale in which ideas, items, and people were weighed upon.

"Finish eating," June said softly, "we will arrive at the arena first."

The rest of the team nodded, forcibly ignoring the other team as they were each served a large milkshake, an item that Jamie specifically knew wasn't on the menu, and couldn't be put in as a special order, despite her desperate attempts to get her hands on one in the early days of training.

They walked to the arena B-3 in silence, arriving and standing within their own little rings without a word. The trainers were all there, Osmium, Tracker, who both teams knew just by word of mouth, and then Willem, who was more of a mystery, though Osmium certainly seemed to know the other man.

Their faces weren't as morose as Ren's team, but they were aware of the situation at the very least. Ren was used to the idea of trainers spying on their teams, especially with the teams that had more funding behind them. Exactly how survived their partner team, really was couldn't really be determined. But enough that when Ren saw Tracker's back straighten, whispering covertly to the stocky man beside her, he knew that the other team was en-route.

Only a minute later the other team walked into the arena, and immediately the tone for today's latter half of training was set.

Any light-heartedness was gone, though not replace by anger. Anger was unproductive when it came to teamwork, to shared goals. Ren watched on as they walked to their spots opposing his own team members, then as Ajax himself walked to his spot his eyes connecting with Ren's own.

"Hey, Ren." He greeted, though there was none of his usual jolly smile or calm tone. Ren nodded back in a cursory greeting as he watched the massive man smoothly remove his fire axe from the holster at his side, the worn wooden handle sliding up the side of Ajax's thickly muscled leg.

Ajax pulled at the axe, releasing it and allowing it to rise through the air unimpeded, with Ajax's hand there to snatch it into his grip once it'd come to a reasonable height. Before, Ajax would have been almost shy of drawing the axe, careful with what was undoubtedly a weapon that could kill someone against someone who seemed to have no weapon at all.

Ren didn't comment on the hypocrisy, because he'd done the same with his hair, turning the organic leaves into what amounted to a secondary muscle system atop his own. A suit armour and a weapon at the same time.

It seems that whatever Aaliyah had said, was their impetus.

Their impetus to evolve.

The fight began without the need for a signal, Ajax brandishing his axe with a decisive mind, and Ren letting the powerful blades of hair flow from his scalp unrestricted.

He'd need it.

---

​

Tracker watched on as the two teams clashed, combat beginning until there was a conclusion, and then repeating once again.

She stood in line with Willem and David, all of them analysing what was happening before their eyes in silence. Usually she'd make a small quip about the carrot and the stick, or about the team finding their motivation, but she just couldn't pull it from herself as she watched them fight.

Their fighting hadn't become desperate, so much as focused. She'd analysed all their fights, back to front, a duty of her job that she was good enough at that she enjoyed it. But their fights had always been lacking in some way and lacking something important too.

Realism and danger.

Two things that were extremely difficult to simulate in an environment where the trainee themselves knew, deep down, that if something were to go terribly wrong, their trainer would be able to intervene. This had been dulled slightly for the fights against Baxter's team, but it'd been so sudden, and they had found themselves with no real motivation to do anything but survive. Any notion of winning had been totally foolish.

So now, the trainers were almost enthralled.

They saw the real grittiness behind their fights, all of them breathing in the air and finding it scented with the blood of battles that they themselves had been involved in, once upon a time. Even the other, far more mature, team didn't quite have the same level of seriousness as Willem and Tracker's did.

A few things pinged in Tracker's mind, the ideas for just what had changed their demeanour to this degree. She was good at retaining information, especially about the individuals she worked with.

Aaliyah Flinn, the daughter of the Monarch.

Mary and Richard Suen, Walter's parents, and a duo of fantastic lawyers.

Tracker noted down in her mind that the information had made it to the team. Information that Tracker had originally thought would manage to allude them for long enough. After all, she had expected Aaliyah to want out of the team since the beginning.

Tracker was wrong. Very wrong. As she looked over the recordings of the cafeteria feed within her memory, she could see just how the conversation went down, almost able to trace the exact words that Aaliyah had used to pose it to her team.

One of the fights took a turn, with the usually jolly Ajax now wearing a mask of stoic determination, not to dissimilar from Willem's when he gets worked up. It had been fifteen bouts now, where Ajax had been using his axe with what many would think was reckless abandon.

But instead, each blow was filled with an almost strategic power. Before, when he'd used his axe in combat, he'd played with it as if it were a tiny shield, blocking and throwing in a hap hazard swing on a rare occasion.

But now, he was almost terrifyingly aggressive with it in his hands. It threw off Ren Ikari's usual strategy of cautious aggressiveness, forcing him back harder and harder. Though it wasn't just the actual danger of the axe that Ren was restricted by, with it cleaving into his grass-like hair and cutting it short multiple times, forcing him to discard his armouring for moments at a time and leaving him vulnerable.

It was also the threat of his axe that Ajax seemed capable of using with surprising mastery. With a single swing at where Ren's arm would be, if he were to throw a punch, Ren was forced to take another action to protect himself instead—limiting options more and more as the fight went on.

The three trainers watched on, one of which took a keen interest in Ajax's fight as he slowly cornered the green haired man. Osmium's eyes glittered, like a hawk spotting movement from a mile away. Tracker could swear that she saw Osmium's muscles twitch with Ajax's movements, his usually dull expression flickering between a moment of delight when that image he held in his mind was adhered to, and grimacing when it was strayed from.

But in the final moments of this fight, Tracker allowed herself to look away from the fight to glance at the legendary Linked, and saw a small grin on his face as his expression almost seemed to sing with approval.

When she turned back to the fight, only the last blow was left. All of Ren's options had been literally cut off, his green hair still desperately trying to regrow fast enough to supplant the rest of the hair that he was trying to remove from around his body as it did so.

Ajax pushed the other man to the ground, and crouched next to him, resting the back of the axe's head on his muscled shoulder and placing a large hand on the man's chest.

Ren grimaced, and Tracker knew that it was over for him, even as his hair continued to grow at a rapid pace, even if it was slowing from when he's started the battle.

"It's over, Ren." Ajax's voice boomed, carrying through the room as he looked at the other man stoically. There was no anger or derision in the Greek man's voice, but there was a regal command to it, like a commander putting his soldiers at ease in the middle of a war.

And when Tracker observed the effect of his words on the rest of those who fought, she realised that her analogy might just be more accurate than she thought. The other's didn't so much as look at their teammate, even after his success, but they sure showed that they had heard him and his message.

Both of Walter's palms spat pillars of fire, chasing the agile form of Julia; Aaliyah's form grew tight, constricting her impressive height into a more compact stance, relying far more on the combat training that Willem had given then than her usual formless blows; and Mirah…

Mirah's eyes burned with the bright webbing of gold lines. Each of her matches only lasting a moment.

But Tracker didn't miss the significance of her very next match, when it had instead lasted two moments, the towering June being evaded by the girl who couldn't even track her with her eyes.

All the trainers knew, in that moment, that they were watching the birth of something special, something more than they'd expected. What it was, exactly, was something that could only be discerned in time.

And Willem?

Willem could wait. Even as his mind slowly began to move on ideas that he'd abandoned years ago, written off as fanciful dreams.

But Willem would wait. He was good at waiting.

For as long as they needed.


A/N: Aah, so satisfying. I wrote the advanced chapter that pays off on some of the stuff in this one today. A coincidence, but a welcome one!

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[Sarius]

Chapter 57: Milkshakes

Walter laid on his couch messily; his posture crooked and one leg hanging off the side, the other hanging off the arm rest. He pressed his palms into his eyes, covering over the defined features and letting his elbows poke up towards the roof as he took big breaths in and out.

"Well, you know," Aaliyah's smooth, thoughtful tone broke the silence of recovery in his loungeroom, "at least we got those milkshakes. I didn't even know you could order them."

"You can't." Walter replied, trying his best to be amiable, even if he really didn't want to be in the same room as her right now, "I tried."

"Apparently you can." Ajax said softly from his relaxed pose in a nearby chair. The man was tall enough that just aligning his shoulders with the back of the chair had his waist hanging off the seat, which the Greek man remedied by placing his legs on the coffee table.

"It was Chef." Mirah said, her tone neutral as always. Almost as neutral, in fact, as her slouching form within the large, plush chair she'd sat in. Walter lifted one of the palms from his eyes, to look at the scarred girl blearily.

"Chef? Are they why you don't ever get what you order?" Walter asked half-heartedly. Mirah nodded succinctly, though Aaliyah scoffed.

"Come on Walt, you're playing behind on the gossip. This was week one stuff." He sighed, desperately wanting to ignore the girl, to give himself at least a little time to process just how rapidly things had shifted right in front of his eyes.

"Right, right," he nodded after a moment, his elbows bobbing up and down with the movement of his head, "the notes Mirah was getting?"

"Bingo!" Aaliyah responded from her place on a large sitting cushion, one that Walter had brought from home because it was his favourite and had proceeded to not use once since he arrived. He'd even promised that he would call home once a week or so, and that'd fallen through by week three. Something that Walter was finding himself regretting sorely.

"But why milkshakes?" Ajax said, a little confused, willing to take the detour in conversation before they inevitably arrived at the hard-hitting topics, "Don't get me wrong, they were great, and I haven't had a milkshake in years. Missed 'em more than I thought."

"Well," Aaliyah said slowly, "probably just because they're good when you're having a rough time. Like the comfort of a tub of ice-cream after a breakup." That was a total lie, of course. Aaliyah had actually never been in a committed relationship, or at least not one that lasted long enough for it to even be classed as one, as horrifically painful as that specific mess had been. Ice-cream did serve well for the depression following your sister's death though. After you spent at least a little while being unable to stomach much more than water.

"Cheers to that." Walter groaned heavily and pulled the palms from his eyes. He linked his fingers together as he rested the back of his hands on his forehead, screwing up his eyes against the artificial light in the ceiling, "God knows I could go for another one right about now."

There was a grumbling response from the rest of the team, even Mirah nodded, an action that Walter caught out of the corner of his eye. Walter couldn't pretend that he felt comfortable around the stoic woman, and he'd probably devolve into a mess if he had to spend time with only her without a clear topic of conversation. However, despite that, he was coming to appreciate her quietness, even if it was somewhat manufactured by the lack of her understanding. She was an easy person to listen to when most of what she said carried significant weight.

"I guess we should just get into it then?" Ajax announced with a sigh, pulling himself up from his comfortably terrible posture and relaxing into a more commanding pose. Walter didn't bother to move, just preparing himself for what was a shitty conversation altogether.

"What are we going with first?" Aaliyah said, exacting at least a little control over the conversation that was likely to put her in the most volatile situation she'd been in for a good while.

"My parents." Walter said, chiming in harshly, his voice already a little raw from just saying the words. A mixture of fear and anger, with a healthy dash of hopelessness. The gnawing dread in his stomach made him feel like throwing up, acidic and bubbling with a vicious glee.

Aaliyah pulled her legs into herself, her long and slender legs guarding her body as she rested her chin on her own knee, "I got the info from Guy, though I don't know if he was being fed questions and answers by Slip. He didn't explicitly say that your parents were working for Baxter or RO, but a look of surprise and an offhand comment about you 'already being punished' was enough to tip me off."

Walter clenched his jaw hard enough that it was already making the headache he'd developed earlier come back with a furious burning in his temples. "He tipped you off, how is that at all reliable?" He hissed as he tried to not direct his overwhelming anger at the blonde woman, even if he could think of any number of reasons that she'd deserve it.

"I'm not going to say that it's one hundred percent accurate, Walt." Aaliyah said evenly, "But I'm willing to put a great deal of money on it. Though I have to say, it was the weirdest information deal that I've ever experienced."

"How so?" Ajax broke in, taking some of the heat off of Aaliyah for a bit, letting Walter mentally and emotionally digest the information he was being served. Aaliyah waved a hand around with a look of consternation, like she was trying to grab an answer out of the air itself.

"I don't know. I feel like he was dropping hints everywhere, even if he wasn't actually telling me all that much straight up. I don't know what his game was." Ajax gave Aaliyah a long, searching look. Ajax was surprisingly perceptive, enough to at least notice that she wasn't being entirely forthcoming about herself when they'd first met. Though, he hadn't intellectually put any of the pieces together until Mirah started acting weird around her, which had tipped him off.

"You're saying that he might be playing double agent?" Ajax asked, thick eyebrow raised at the girl sitting on the floor, though it only made her bark out a laugh.

"Dated tropes, Ajax. Where have you been, the eighties?" Though she shrugged and sighed after a moment, "No, I don't think he's doubling for anyone. I just think he likes Jeremy and the rest of his team about as much as we like them. I think Slip had a goal in sending him instead of meeting me himself, and it backfired."

"That's a little convoluted, Aaliyah." Ajax said clearly, cutting through her use of speculatory sentences. "What's the likelihood of any of that being the reality?"

"I–" Aaliyah began, her voice frustrated and almost offended, before winding down as she pushed the red spots that had appeared on her skin, "Look. I do my research, alright?"

"And I'm not saying that you don't. I'm asking if–"

"I know what you're asking!" She hissed roughly, fighting against the flash of red on her skin. Aaliyah struggled to push it down with a collection of deep breaths as she realised that all of her teammates were suddenly on edge, muscles tensed, almost like she was going to attack them.

"Alright! Fine." She said, steeling herself against her own vulnerability, "I've been digging up info about their team for ages, since after our fight with them. I've found fuck all on Slip, cause he's probably a street rat with less documentation than you'd get out of where your dubiously manufactured smartphone was made." She took in a deep breath, chewing at the side of her mouth, stopping herself as she faintly tasted the pungent metallic flavour of blood.

"Terrence Nguyen, the telekinetic that Walter fought, is the son of a High Order psychopath, Binh Nguyen. She owns most of the 'independent' supermarkets and one of the bigger chains, probably around fifteen or twenty percent market share. All in all."

"Impressive." Walter said with dry sarcasm.

"It would be," Aaliyah agreed, ignoring Walter's cutting sarcasm, "if she hadn't married a man, had children with him, tortured them secretly in their early years, and then after she tortured Terrence into Awakening, she forced him to kill his father and his siblings."

The room's air seemed to run cold around their skin, forcing a tingling sensation of fear to run down their spines, even for Aaliyah. Somehow, saying it out loud to others was so much scarier than it was when she had read it and kept it to herself.

"That's fucked." Walter said dully. He didn't have the emotional capacity to display the dread laying in his stomach, only compounded by the fact that he was coming to realise that he had fought a mass-murderer. The terrifying thought of just what that final kinetic blow the other man had landed was supposed to do to him just…

He couldn't think about it. Not right now.

"Jeremy probably isn't any better. I have no doubts that he's killed before, and either his dearest daddy has swept it under the proverbial rug, or he's just killed everyone that could've talked. Slip is basically the same, though he's more likely to be an accessory to a murder than an actual perpetrator. He, no doubt, had a hand in them, though." She slowed her words, leaning back against the wall behind her, pulling into herself further.

"Jesus Christ," Ajax intoned, though the man lacked any real connection to religion, "why the fuck are so many people murderers?" Aaliyah hid her grimace, knowing that the man definitely included her in that statement. She wanted to argue the point, to tell him that some people have their reasons, or that there might even be a good reason behind some of them, but she kept her mouth clamped shut. If she spoke now, she'd be lumping herself in with Jeremy Baxter, and that certainly wouldn't earn her any favours.

Not with her little reveal earlier in the day, anyway.

"What about Guy?" The soft and remarkably pleasant voice belonging to Mirah rung out in the conversation. Aaliyah felt the twisted emotions in the air unravel, as if she'd cut the knotted ropes with her voice and released more tension that the words had any right to be.

"And that, Mirah, is where shit got weird." Aaliyah said, letting a little playfulness leak into her voice, "Or, depending on how observant you were at the time, very boring." The team's interest was piqued, with even Walter shifting slightly to be able to glance at her with his sour expression.

"Get on with it." He said sharply, not appreciating the playful tone. Aaliyah didn't bother to bristle at the remark.

"I got the name of his primary school, high school, and a few hobby clubs that he was involved in for a while. Even got the name of his mum and a few other bits and pieces along the way, but even when I snooped further and got a hold of his school reports–"

"Jesus, Aaliyah." Ajax groaned, though she glowered at him.

"I don't see you having any solid information to work off of, Ajax. Want to share something with the class?" Aaliyah snapped, feeling the line had been croseed. Ajax just closed his eyes and sighed heavily, crossing his arms as he waited for her to continue.

"As I was saying," she continued accusingly, "I got a hold of his school repots, and I was honestly expecting something about violence or general assholery, but I found that he was basically just a normal kid with social anxiety and a light mention of bullying." She stopped and thought for a moment.

"Bets on the 'light bullying' being why he ended up Awakening?" She looked between the unresponsive faces, then shrugged, "Anyway. Last night I spent some time going over his stuff again after I met him, and found some interesting info on his mother's past. Or lack of it, I should say.

"So, riddle me this. How does a street-born nobody end up with enough money to run away to the wealthy districts from her life on the streets with her child?" None of the team members answered her, and she didn't bother going through the list of possibilities either. She had no real answer, but there was some wacky shit happening in Guy's past, or in his Mother's past, and that was enough to draw suspicion for her.

"And what do we do about that?" Ajax said, prompting her forward with a dull question.

"For now, nothing. We keep it in mind as we go, and when the time comes, we are the ones with the information." Aaliyah answered just as dully, leaving the room in a state of constipated frustration. All of them, Aaliyah included, want actionable information yesterday; that way they can actually get a handle on the situation they're in. Until then it's a bit of a wash, but they have a start now, and that start was going to be invaluable no matter how they sliced it.

Walter took this moment to sit up from the plush recesses of his couch, turning to face the tall blonde head on, his eyes just about burning with a smouldering anger.

"And what do we do about you, Monarch?" He said quietly, the venom just about dripping from his words. Aaliyah tried to reconcile the awkward, flustered boy she'd met on her first day in the building with the man she was currently looking at, his eyes just about screaming their anger at her.

"I–" But there was a sharp knock at the door, cutting her sentence off and leaving the room in a state of confused, but tense, silence. From the corner of the room, sitting in the plush chair with her issued smartphone, Mirah stood and quickly walked to the door, opening it, and retrieving something from the floor.

The odd display of not only Mirah using a smartphone—which none of them had ever seen her do in the past—but extricating herself from the conversation so neatly, made the rest of the team just stare dumbly as she returned with a tray of four large, metallic cups. Their outer surface was slightly fogged, with perspiration littering it as the cold liquid it contained thoroughly cooled the cup itself.

She placed the tray on the table, taking one of the thick. metal straws also on the tray, and retreating to her chair, inserting the straw into the cup filled with the creamy, chocolatey mixture.

Ajax was the first to break the silence, snorting loudly enough that he made himself burst out in laughter, slapping heavily against his knee all the while as Aaliyah struggled to keep her face to a smirk rather than the wide grin it wanted to split into.

"What the hell Mirah." Walter said defeatedly, though the scarred girl responded with a raised eyebrow as she drank from the straw.

"Milkshakes?" She said questioningly, only furthering Ajax's laugh into what could only be described as a howl, with Aaliyah finally breaking and joining in with a laugh of her own. Walter just covered his face, trying to collect himself against the bizarre moment.

Though he had to hid the tremors of his own laugh as it managed to infect his own expression.

"God damn milkshakes." He groaned.


A/N: Been rough for a while, hoping I can get back into it better, but we'll have to see. Hope you're all feeling well.

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