Fixture in Fate (Superhero/Worm-like)

[Sarius]

Chapter 58: Necessity

Mirah held the now warm metal cup in her hands, her body heat having long diffused into the up after she'd drunk the cold contents.

All the rest of the team had as well, except for Aaliyah, who had been explaining just about anything that Walter and Ajax could think to ask. Which was a lot. Mirah had just let it happen in front of her eyes, supposing that they would know what questions to ask better than her.

She'd almost tuned out at a few places, especially as the hours got later and later—but she didn't want to up and leave the room to go sleep. She might be blind to many social situations, not really one to care about the strict levels of importance that others place on certain conversations, but even she could understand why Walter and Ajax wanted to know everything.

Mirah just wished that they didn't need to know everything-everything. Though, she had to admit, she had a bit of a leg up when it came to Aaliyah's past. She'd known a lot of this for a while, since she'd convinced Aaliyah to give the team an actual shot at working. What she didn't know about didn't really change her already formed opinion on her.

She'd know about her being the Monarch. She'd know about her sister, her father, and how she'd killed him for his crimes and the hurt that he'd sown. She knew she'd tortured him, and the bitter and hollow emotion it left behind in her soul when she did it.

But they didn't know that she knew.

Maybe she hadn't quite known the extent of her torture, or the lengths she'd gone to make sure that the ship he'd built sank to the bottom of the sea, but Mirah's opinion on the matter was nigh unshakable.

Aaliyah had done what must be done. It was dirty, and horrid, and it had scarred her for life in a way far more visceral than Mirah's torn and poorly healed flesh. But it had been necessary, and it had worked.

She'd spent hours describing how she'd done it, and with each mention of a name, or a gang, Walter and Ajax's expressions dipped into grimmer and grimmer territory. Aaliyah had played them like a fiddle, using the rumour of the Monarch having an info link to her advantage. She manipulated gangs against each other, slowly leading her father's wounded gang into shark infested waters, all the while claiming that they were simply being attacked for their supposed weakness.

With that tactic alone, she'd managed to manipulate powerful Linked into being slaughtered, crushing entire supply lines at the lower levels that powerful gangs like RO had spent years and millions of dollars building. But in the process, she'd inadvertently ordered the deaths of at least hundreds of people.

People that had families and friends, and gang mates; all of which would live on to hate the Monarch for the loss the name had represented to them. They would forever hate the Flinn name and anyone who might try to take the mantle of the Monarch once again.

And when Aaliyah Flinn stood in the burning, wreckage of all her father had built over ten years, billowing with black, choking smoke… she'd left to live a life of insecurity and destitution. Even if not everyone had known of the Monarch being replaced by his daughter in his empire's final months, just the name alone was enough to block her out of any opportunity that her future might have.

She was, in a manner of speaking, totally shit out of luck.

Mirah cast her gaze around the room, watching the two men of the group struggle to process the extremely dark history that'd been professed to them. It wasn't often that you met someone who'd been so significant in orchestrating the downfall of drug empire that they'd all heard of the legendary downfall.

Everyone had simply chalked it up to criminal empires inevitably falling to the entropy of the criminal world, picking away at their base like crows would at the eyes of a dead man. But no, it'd taken action from a girl not even her adulthood to do it.

Even while the two boys were working through their misgivings they couldn't deny it. Everyone in the team, even Mirah, had realised that Aaliyah was pretty good at the whole social thing. Maybe not in the way that was conventional, with Ajax being a far easier person to get along with, but with being someone that she wasn't.

Aaliyah was an actor, an astoundingly good one. She hadn't been the cold and ruthless figure that her father had been, a necessary trait to have grown the empire that he had. So she had become that, assuming that role with enough legitimacy that she'd managed to convince an actual gang of Linked to follow her into the ground.

It was beyond impressive. It was astounding.

The rest of the team had pretty much nothing to come even close to that feat. The feat, while horrible in almost every sense of the word, seemed almost impossible for Ajax and Walter. And despite their misgivings, despite every moralistic argument they could possibly make—and had made during her retelling of the story—they were still faced with the inexorable truth.

Aaliyah had done what was necessary, rather than what was easy or safe. She had gone well and truly beyond herself to take down an entire drug empire and its constituent parts. Sure, it was motivated by revenge, and torturing her father the way she had was extreme. Maybe you could even call her orchestrating the deaths of at least ten Linked into question. But for what?

What else was she going to do? Command the police to take them in? Put them in a dark pit and try and keep them prisoner?

That was stupid. You needed money, time, skilled labour, Linked, and infrastructure to even think about holding any number of Linked. The AFP, when their Linked division was still even being funded, had enough of a problem keeping Linked imprisoned. There were just too many ways for Linked to dance around conventional understanding for it to be a reality outside of some very high-end linktech structures.

Even Walter, who was particularly disturbed by the deaths attributed to Aaliyah's name, could see that leaving them alive wasn't a reasonable response.

Walter knew, intellectually, that being anything even close to a Hero in today's day and age was almost engineered to be a horrific path of death. He'd read too many comic books that played on that exact reality. He knew that causing someone's death was inevitable as a Hero, whether by accident or by necessity.

But that didn't mean he had to like it, even if he was forced to accept it. He felt absolutely sick to his stomach, bile and acid mockingly reaching up his throat as his jaw clenched down on itself with a massive force, his bones creaking nervously.

"So that's me." Aaliyah said finally, having let the silence sit for much longer than she'd expected. She sipped idly at the remains of her chocolate milkshake, finally reaching the bottom of what was now a lukewarm mixture, the sudden and acerbic sound breaking any contemplation that the others could have been doing.

"Jesus." Walter said, rubbing his hand against his face with a mix of frustration and disgust, "I'm going to bed."

He didn't stop to say good night, nor did he tell them to get out of his room either. He just wearily walked into his room, shutting the door gently behind him, and leaving the other three of his teammates to sit in an uncomfortable silence.

"I guess we should all go to bed." Ajax mused wryly, looking to the two women tiredly.

"It is three AM, yes." Aaliyah said, putting her spent cup to her side and leaning back on her pillow, pressing up against the wall. She rotated her neck gently, stretching it out and letting herself relax after the pouring out of her heart. Or as close to it as she could get anymore.

But when she lowered her eyes to focus back on Ajax, she realised that he was looking at Mirah, eyebrows furrowed.

"You're not surprised." He stated to the woman, before turning back to Aaliyah with questioning eyes. "You told Mirah?"

"Well, not quite." Aaliyah laughed, resigned to the strange occurrence that'd granted Mirah with her literal memories.

"I was her for a while. When I was sleeping." Mirah continued, which made Ajax reel back and clutch against his head, looking back towards Aaliyah, almost begging to be given a context where that wasn't the weirdest thing he'd ever heard.

"It was an effect of my link. Depression, dreaming, or remembering… maybe. Some weird emotion made it happen, but I can apparently share memories with other people. Might need to be sleeping, though." She grimaced light-heartedly at the man, who was now running his fingers through his hair in distress. The explanation had, in fact, only made the whole idea of it even more batshit insane.

"Fucking links." Ajax groaned as he wrested himself from his chair, quickly leaving the room altogether without another word—leaving only the two girls of the team to sit near each other in silence.

Aaliyah couldn't help but deflate a little with the two boys gone. She'd expected more accusation, more disgust, but the amount that Ajax and Walter had displayed was paltry in comparison to the warnings of death that she was sure she was going to get. They were more accepting than she'd thought, and that was almost more concerning than not.

Mirah though… Aaliyah had thought that her mind would change. She'd gone so far to say that Aaliyah was a Hero when she'd been in her memories. Seriously? A Hero? After all that pain and suffering she'd caused, she was a Hero?

She had thought it was a lie. A convenient lie to give her hope, that her sins could have some morality in the face of the destruction it'd wrought and the people it'd killed. It's what she would have done, to give someone like her hope.

But when she returned her gaze to Mirah, fearing the worst… but her face was almost entirely unchanged. Starkly unchanged in comparison to Ajax and Walter. She could see now how Ajax had realised that Mirah had already known about her, and what she'd done. But knowing that, and actually believing that someone could have their opinions of someone so thoroughly unchanged by knowing the specifics of how a teammate had killed probably in the realm of hundreds, if inadvertently.

"Why are you so…" Aaliyah blurted out, unable to stop her mind from pushing the question out of her mouth, but halting when she couldn't quite find the right word immediately, "unflappable?" The woman in question scrunched her eyebrows slightly, the fine, dark-brown hairs making her much lighter skin seem almost pale.

"I am not." She replied, words drier than a desert. Aaliyah wasn't fooled by the overly tacit responses. Mirah had a way with words when she actually spoke, though that was restricted by her rather boring vocabulary in the beginning. But now, she'd been around others and talking intermittently for months—slowly building her vocabulary to something more than dry words.

"You are." Aaliyah countered, though she also didn't bother to continue on. Her words were self-evident, and Mirah seemed to give up on the argument altogether. Whether that meant that she conceded, or she just didn't care to continue to argue, Aaliyah couldn't possibly know. The other girls' expression was a maze of dead-ends.

Aaliyah suspected that, unless she could find a telepath, she might not ever know what the other girl was thinking. Not to the more exact readings she could get from Walter and Ajax. It was perturbing how good the other girl was at obfuscating her emotions and thoughts, and it was likely never going to not be.

"Anyway," The blonde sighed as she stiffly rose from her cushion on the ground, stretching a little while she did, "We can't really stay in Walt's room for the night." She left their teammate's room, Mirah following just behind her quietly like a baby duckling. A very stoic baby duckling.

Aaliyah walked slowly down the hall, wearily looking at the patterned, dark grey carpet and following the with her eyes as she walked forwards. She trudged towards her door dreaming of resting in her bed and loathing the idea of waking up on time in the morning.

She heard Mirah's door open, making her turn her head to meet with the girl's open door and those green eyes staring back at her. She gulped a little, hating that the girl's gaze was able to be so ludicrously striking. Mirah held her gaze, piercing through her tiredness and somehow managing to wake her for just a moment.

"They didn't say it, but they thought it." Mirah intoned gently, making Aaliyah scrunch her face with confusion, "You did what needed to be done." She completed, before nodding gently and disappearing into her room, leaving Aaliyah standing outside her own door, a little dumbstruck.

"I did what needed to be done?" She repeated, though the words were sour in her mouth, almost painful against her tongue. She couldn't quite trust herself to believe those words. Not right now. But someday in the future, she might even be able to say the words proudly. Like a Hero could.

She scoffed, "A Hero. Sure." And opened the door to her room, and quickly sought the bed.


A/N: Sorry for the break, life is a bitch. Hope you all have a good one!

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 59: Aimless

What was a Hero?

A question for the ages, even before those with 'superpowers' appeared some half century ago. It was a difficult question to answer, in its essence. What necessitated the label of Hero? Did you merely have to save a life, either directly or from an abstract perspective? Did you need to act heroic, to stand tall and to do right at a cost to self?

Would that mean that someone that comes from ultimate power can't be a Hero? How much cost to one's self do you need to incur before an action is suitably heroic? Those without a link at all might save another person at the cost of their own life, or very near to it. Is that action inherently more Heroic than someone with a powerful link stopping another Linked from killing hundreds, if not thousands, of innocents?

Where is the line? What is the line?

Walter was no fool, but he was also idealistic. He wanted to go back to a world that revered the icons of strength, justice, and morality that the comic book characters of yesteryear represented. They had been massive, world spanning names that more people knew of than was strictly necessary. There are old, vintage films made on these characters, a story created to show the struggle of good against evil, morality against the chaos that lacks it.

But they had disappeared now. Even those who once loved those films in their childhood denied having ever seen them, or even knowing the names of the Heroes that star in them. Walter always wanted to know why? Why would you abandon those ideals so suddenly and try to rid the world of them so completely?

Now, at least a little, he understood.

What had Aaliyah been to him? Not a Hero, certainly, not much of a friend either, even after all of their interactions. Maybe he had been interested in her, romantically, but that was as fleeting as any of those emotions are.

At the very least, he had counted her as someone that at least pretended that she wanted something similar to what he did. Walter wanted to help people, Ajax wanted to protect people, Mirah wanted what Mirah wanted, and Aaliyah?

He wasn't so sure about Aaliyah, never was. Her motives and interests had always been a mystery, and one that was hidden from immediate sight, unlike Mirah's own, which the girl herself probably didn't know all that well. Walter had worried that Aaliyah was using their interests as a springboard, to simply include herself in the group as they got stronger and leave it when the moment was right for her.

He had counted on some level of selfishness from her, especially as more of Aaliyah's true, rather acerbic, and somewhat ugly personality started to shine through the cracks of her veneer around the rest of the group. Especially as Mirah was the equivalent of a social blunt weapon, and there wasn't much of anything significant you could hide from the woman without her taking a swing and seeing where it landed.

It had been Mirah that had uncovered Walter and Ajax's… heroic intentions with the training they were receiving, after all.

So, colour Walter surprised when Aaliyah herself was the one to open up. To the whole team, no less. None of them had done that yet. It was a massive leap of faith, to reveal their darkest past, the reason for their Awakening, their greatest sins…

And sins they were. Morally conflicting, horrifying, sins.

Aaliyah's talk had wounded Walter in a way he wasn't quite sure he could fathom. Walter could claim up and down that he wasn't naïve, that he understood the ramifications, socially and societally, for the introduction of a heroic element into the mixing pot. He could even say that he understood, morally, that there were times where evil in measured amounts must be committed to save the world from more evil.

The death of a man who very well may be just extremely unwell, who could possibly recover to even be a force for good within the world, might simply need to die because of the danger he possesses. It might seem cold and callous to believe so, but Walter could agree with the idea, though hesitantly.

Mentally unwell and extremely dangerous were one and the same with Linked. How long would it be before someone with a psychiatric disorder, who was only a few small pills away from becoming someone good, loses control and begins a wave of mass killings?

It had already happened once. In fact, Suicide wasn't even the beginning, he was more the prophesised child, to be born and to die by the predictions made by the repetitions of history. Before him was far too many mass murderers to count, and since there have been even more.

So why? When he can make such an easy moral choice between the death of one man who has lost control and the safety of others, why was it so hard to reconcile Aaliyah's actions within himself?

Maybe it was the reality of it. It was the sick feeling in his stomach as she had described each step she'd taken, each moment in time that lead her to her next inevitable sin. It was the reality of her father, and the torture that she had inflicted upon him, that had really hurt Walter's ability to rectify it against his morality.

It was revenge, plain and simple. Aaliyah hadn't even tried to pretend that it was anything but the ultimate revenge that she could sow for her father's demise And her father had deserved it. The Monarch was an evil, evil man, without a shadow of a doubt.

How many had her father killed with the drugs that he had slowly got much of Melbourne hooked on? Kids with parents who had died from their drug use, which those kids would then fall into themselves, repeating the cycle because the Monarch's drugs were always there. Not to mention cutting those drugs with all sorts of things so that they could reduce the costs of the drugs in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods without eating into the profits.

It was disgusting. In fact, Walter couldn't possibly think of much worse than someone who was so willing to distribute drugs that killed incessantly, and then have the gall to be heartbroken when his own drugs killed his daughter.

The mere thought of the man and his actions made Walter's blood run hot, and the fire that always seemed to sit just below his skin burned with the rage. Walter had never unintentionally let forth a burst of fire, and he didn't do so now, likely a sign that no matter how enraged he became, the flames would always remain under his control.

But that visceral hate, instead of propelling his mind into the swirling rage that would have possibly led to the torture that Aaliyah had inflicted upon her father, it instead only made Walter more sceptical of his emotions.

Walter hated this man, yes. He hated him for not what he had done to Walter himself, but to those who had ever been affected by the Monarch's rule over drugs. Because there had been a lot, and it was beyond a possibility that Ajax's own parents, namely his father, had died due to the Monarch's drugs.

But if Aaliyah had simply killed the man, as she could have done instead of keeping him restrained in her home's basement, Walter would be able to rectify this that much easier. Because it needed to happen, the Monarch needed to disappear for her to take his place and then destroy his empire from the inside out, causing what would have been irreparable damage to the supply chains in those areas for at least a while. Though Walter held no doubt that they'd long since been rebuilt, at least to some degree.

Walter was willing to bear the moral burden of all the indirect death that Aaliyah had caused, the Linked that had died along with those who had ended up in a gang and had risen through its ranks to earn money of off the pain they inflicted on others and their lives.

Were they pitiful? Sometimes. Did it make Walter feel horrible, right down to the very core of his being, his mind being affronted with the reality that he might just have made the very same choice that Aaliyah had.

Would he have done everything the same way? No. He would have tried to give people more outs, to try and make as much good out of the horrific situation as he possibly could.

But… would he have been able to do anything at all? Aaliyah's torturing of her father, no matter how bad it had made her feel, was something that Walter found unnecessarily cruel. Whether he deserved torture isn't important, it was the morality of the action itself.

Yet was that the barrier that Walter would have found himself up against? Would he have been able to do any of what she had done, knowing that ever word he spoke, and every moment spent was focused around destroying empires made of people. People who he'd have to kill, however abstracted he was from the act itself.

So, he was lost within a mire of indecision. He didn't know how to feel about Aaliyah's actions. He didn't even know how to properly frame them in his mind, to get the most authentic idea of them that he could.

Walter blinked back to reality, finding himself sitting at the cafeteria table that was reserved for his team, with no clear memory of how he'd gotten himself there from the bed in his room. While he might be confused, his body told him that he had indeed managed to make the short trip almost entirely unconscious.

He'd even ordered food, which was eggs on toast, and had been in front of him for so long that it had gone stone cold. Walter sighed, placing down the knife and fork that he'd picked up at some point and running his hand through the hair that he usually kept at a semi-short length, though it'd grown out quite a bit since his arrival at the AASAU.

It was early in the morning too, having never really gone to sleep—and he'd expected that the others hadn't slept either, though they weren't down at the cafeteria so early. In fact, almost no-one was. It was almost calm in comparison to the hustle and bustle attitude most took in the early morning.

Now that he looked at the food in front of him, Walter realised that he really didn't feel hungry. His stomach was sick to its deepest point, mocking him with the simultaneous requests to eat, and the slight pang of nausea when he even thought about doing so.

He felt bad for doing so, but he stood from his table after crossing the knife and fork over the food, leaving it untouched along with the cup of coffee he had started drinking in the morning, more for its taste than any real energy benefit.

Walter began to walk a little aimlessly, choosing to go down to the Underground and walk through its grid of walkways and doors, all of which were obscenely clean. He'd always wondered how that was done, but there was no janitors room that he'd seen, so as far as he was aware, it was either linktech or someone with a link. It was impressive either way.

Walter didn't even really know what time it actually was, and his perception of time was thrown off significantly by the increased amount of energy that he'd found access to after training for a month or so. Waking up and going to sleep was always going to be a struggle for Walter, but he could probably stay awake for twenty-four hours and be totally unaffected. Forty-eight would be pushing it, though.

Whatever time it was, it was early enough that the late nighters had gone to bed, and the early birds weren't awake yet. He was surprised that the cafeteria was even making food at that time, but maybe they had someone on call overnight. He had heard that some morphed Linked go nocturnal after they Awaken, but that sounds pretty rare.

Walter's feet eventually take him down the long hallway to where they had been training with the team of morphs since a few days ago now. It was a long walk, but his whirring mind made it feel like only a few moments before he found himself at the door of the arena, opening it with an idle curiosity.

He didn't know if anyone would be inside and using the arena so early, but he was surprised to find the lights on as he opened the door. Really, Walter was interested in looking for a place to himself that wasn't his room, and the large arena—though still smaller than the capital 'A' Arena—was perfect to give him the physical space needed to think.

Walter opened the door more, pushing out one of its two doors and peering through the linktech created material the walkway was made from, trying to get a decent look up the steps to where the main area was.

Failing to see much more than the walls of the arena and part of its high ceilings, Walter decided to walk in quietly and take a look at who might be inside. The walk was short, leading him up the steps to allow him to gaze over the arena's wide field. Immediately he recognised the arena's single occupant, sitting in a cross-legged position in the middle of the arena, eyes closed and breathing at a consistent rate.

"Osmium?" Walter whispered, his own mouth getting ahead of his mind and just blurting out the first thing that came to the forefront of his brain. He could feel his eyes widen as he stood stock still, desperately hoping that the legendary Linked hadn't heard his voice. A moment passed, and then another, and the man in the arena didn't seem to have notice Walter's vocal misstep at all.

With a quick breath of relief, Walter turned slowly, trying to make his feet as light as possible as he retreated down the steps, fearing that he'd disturb the man.

"Yes, though I do prefer David, nowadays." The clear, distinctive voice of the man echoed easily over the arena, meeting Walter's ears with a shock of panic, before Walter's face pulled itself into possibly the most intense grimace of his entire life.

Well shit. What a way to make an impression on your childhood hero at three in the morning.


A/N: Hope you're all enjoying the chapters! Tell me about how you've liked Fixture in Fate so far, would love to hear your thoughts!

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 60: Legend

The man sat stock still only metres away from Walter, the man having invited him to sit just across from him. The man was shorter than Walter had expected, even after having read all of the information that various wiki pages had on him, even if the only half decent page was on an Australian nineties and two-thousands television wiki.

Walter had managed to keep his cool when he'd first encountered the man, the shock and awe being somehow diffused throughout the rest of the people present. A few—like Mirah, Tracker, and Willem—didn't seem fazed by the man's sudden appearance, but everyone else was suitably flabbergasted.

But now, with only Walter and the Osmium in the large arena, there was nowhere for the starstruck feeling in Walter's stomach to go. He struggled against it, trying to push it down and make himself seem as normal and unfazed as he could, but his hands were betraying his efforts with their tremoring.

Walter's entire body felt light and airy and his legs, if he were standing, would be shaking hard enough that he wouldn't be able to stand and look normal at all. It was almost a blessing that the man had asked him to sit, and somewhere in Walter's adrenalin addled brain, he realised that it was probably for this exact reason that David had asked him to sit down. Saving at least some of Walter's dignity.

"You are… Walter, yes?" The man said in his ever-precise tone, including its distinctive light nasal tone to accompany it. Walter swallowed heavily as the man picked his name correctly, a pang of giddiness in his stomach forcing a weak smile to his face, even as he tried desperately to push it down

"Uh, yes sir. That's me." He said, his voice a lot clearer than he really felt inside, but he wasn't about to complain that his voice was holding up. A voice crack right now would send this memory straight into the cringe compilation that played late at night when he couldn't sleep. He really didn't want that.

The man nodded a little, opening his eyes to look at Walter with his piercing gaze. "You and your team have started to grow in power now. I don't think it will be long before you easily rival the team under my charge."

Walter's eyes widened a little, a shock of dread running through his organs like lightning. "Oh, I'm sorry I–" But as he started to uselessly apologise, David shook his head sharply.

"There is no need for apologies. They are for when you've done something wrong, Walter." The man relaxed slightly from his upright sitting position, slumping over into a position that you'd never have seen Osmium in, at least not on camera. "Your team have more motivation than my own. Where they are unsure about their future, your team has a goal. It'll be the reason your team will soon be stronger."

"I, well, I don't know about that." Walter stammered out, and he felt it was truthful, too. "Only Ajax has beaten anyone yet, and we always forget just how strong he can be. His link is hard to get a grasp of but depending on the situation he could probably go toe-to-toe with Willem. Maybe"

The old Linked turned to Walter solidly, one eyebrow raising speculatively. Walter couldn't quite decipher what the eyebrow was supposed to mean, throwing him into a quick cycle of anxious thoughts before David spoke.

"If he were capable of that, then he would be extremely impressive. I won't profess to know the inner workings of a link so complex, not when my own is so straight forward, but being able to match Willem is a feat in and of itself."

Walter narrowed his eyes at the man, pushing aside his starstruck anxiousness for a moment and readying himself to ask the question that rested on his lips, but David turned his gaze away from him and continued to speak regardless of the obvious question.

"Your team is created from Undefined, correct?" He asked plainly, pushing forward the conversation with a question he clearly already knew the answer to.

"Yes, sir." Walter said slowly, taking his time with the words, "I was the only one who was actually labelled that by the AASAU, though. We don't really know why we were put together, not when the AASAU hates using Undefined like they do."

"They do not hate it," David corrected calmly, "they are just overly concerned with the numbers. They let it all overwhelm them, and that is a fatal mistake, one they have been making for years."

Walter wasn't about to disagree with the man. Public consensus was that the AASAU should be taking a larger part in policing those that hold the certifications and licenses that they hand out. But it was so plainly obvious that the AASAU was corrupt to its bone, probably even more so than the government itself.

The only way to govern linked is with the support of either someone so overwhelmingly powerful that they had no option but to obey, or to have powerful and continually upgraded infrastructure that allows for prisons and other facilities needed to restrain Linked. The first option was something that Australia simply didn't have. There was no Centerpoint equivalent, not really, only a lot of powerful individuals all doing their own thing in their own little gangs.

The closest equivalent would be the Wastelanders, but they were so far into the insane that there was absolutely no way they'd possibly agree to help someone. As far as anyone knew, the three Linked lived somewhere out in the middle of their self-created hellscape, far too comfortably for Walter's liking.

The second… well, that was only something that could really happen if the corruption that pervades almost every system in modern Australia were to be relieved, or someone were to do it themselves as a private individual or group. Maybe someone with an extremely powerful hypercognitive ability specialising in infrastructural tech along with someone capable of setting it all up somehow.

They were only two of the most obvious, clearest solutions, and there was already so many issues with them that simply just took them off the table. Which only left the harder, gruelling, and potentially war-like options.

"How'd you deal with it all?" Walter sighed out, pulling the man's gaze once again, a questioning gaze this time. Walter didn't need to elaborate further, though. David, who was once Osmium, knew that expression far too well. On his teammates, colleagues, friends and family… himself, on occasion.

"We do what we can." He replied, the simple advice being just as cliched as it could be, though Walter was still quick to listen to Linked. "I retired for that reason, as many have suspected. The Federal Police were interfering more in who our team could go after, tightening restrictions to their limit. I left when I realised that nothing was going to change."

Walter swallowed heavily. He had known it to be true for years, the wikis and forums had speculated on the choice, especially with rumours that he was intending to go rogue with a collection of former partners.

"Was it ever true that you were going to start doing it all on your own?" He asked tentatively. David had never once confirmed any of these rumours, always simply having ignored the questions entirely, or dodged them with a skilful ease that somewhere around a decade of PR training would give you.

"Never with any solidity, though there are moments that I wonder if I should have." The man mused, almost wistfully. An odd tone on a man that was revered as a stoic symbol of exact justice. At least, he was quite a few years ago.

"Why didn't you?" Walter asked, trying to hide the ravenous need for the answer. After all, he was aspiring to be a Hero in the modern day, a task that not many entertain, and even less have pursued in any real capacity.

"Too messy." David said with a crisp finality to the words, "Procedure has no place in vigilante work. Information is scarce and hard to come by, with no system of contracts that the police have, especially with tools that can do so much as look through walls. The amount of money and time someone would have to spend to rival the police's resources would be astronomical, especially when they are going to be one of a few people working on it.

"The reality is that justice and procedure go out the window as soon as you step out on those streets with a goal to take down someone big and nasty. There are people who certainly need to be stopped, sometimes at all costs, but when you go out there and start pushing and shoving, it escalates into having to kill someone in minutes."

Walter felt his face almost go cold as the blood drained from it. He had no doubt that, even with his warmer skin tone, he looked totally ashen in that moment. Osmium, a Linked of legendarily ironclad morals, gave Walter a sad smile—breaking the image of a stoic expression.

"I can see what you plan, Walter. It's written all over you and your team, and I can just about spot an idealist from a mile away." Walter began flush with a shame so intense that he could feel his stomach turn into a raisin, but David interrupted the man's decent into anxiety.

"I am an idealist too, of course." David's face was back to its classically stoic expression now, though Walter could swear that he was the tiniest glint of a teasing amusement in the man's eye.

"However," he continued, pausing intermittently to let the man recover for a moment, "I'm not idealistic enough to overlook what I would be doing out there. During my time as Osmium I can count on one hand the amount of times I needed to kill someone, or injuries I gave someone resulting in their death." He held up four fingers, giving each of them a pertinent look, clearly remembering names and face.

"But out there you don't have that choice, or the leeway to make that choice. I wouldn't be able to sleep a night if I started to forget the names of those I had to kill."

Walter frowned, staring into the ground by his crossed legs, not able to force himself into meeting the legendary man's gaze. The words David had spoken hadn't changed Walter's mind, because they hadn't been a new revelation for Walter. He would have had to have this talk two days ago for that to be true. What it did do, however, was solidify his mind on it. It stripped it of the emotionally and morally confusing elements and put it into a stark reality.

"I know." Walter said, mirroring the man's clear and concise tone, "I know that it'll be dangerous, and it'll cause harm. I might even be forced to kill, maybe more than just once. But… no one else seems to want to do it. There's no one to rally behind or look to when they need to be shown that there's more, that there is hope."

Walter paused for a moment, grimly clenching his jaw, "You were that for us."

David's expression didn't change, giving Walter nothing to work with, until he spoke. "I was a police officer, before I Awakened. It was my job, and I was good at it. I only worked in a small town, and everyone knew everyone, and even the worst offenders in the town liked me. They would be willing to take a trip to the station with me, rather than try and punch me out. I was never ready to become what I did, and I'm not sure anyone would be."

"But you were a Hero." Walter said calmly. He'd have thought he'd be more angry as the man of his childhood belittled himself, the man that he'd dreamed would one day enter his home and put a stop to those that threatened his parents with what amounted to death.

"I tried to be." David responded, "And it worked, for a while, but I was never able to stay that way. I had the power and the vision… but I didn't have the drive. So instead," He waved his hand around the arena, gesturing to the AASAU as a whole, "I decided that I would train the generations of Linked as best I could, and hopefully someone with the drive would come along to fulfill what I couldn't."

The man stood before Walter could ask anymore question, brushing off his casual grey slacks, then beginning to walk away with Walter watching his form recede away from him, down the steps and hearing a slight rush of air from outside the arena as the door was opened. Though it stayed open longer than the moment that the man would need to walk through it.

"I will see you in a few hours for training. Work hard." And then the flow of air ceased, leaving Walter in the arena all alone.

"Work hard…" Walter repeated idly as he stood, looking around the empty arena, then summoning a small flame to sit just over his palm, totally uniform and unflinching, almost as if a gem of light were sitting in his hand.

"I guess we should train a bit before then."


A/N: I quite like Osmium—I mean David. He's a pretty understated guy, for the mantle he once upheld. Hope you enjoyed the chapter!

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 61: Death Blow

Julia's morning was as standard as it could be, with the week of sudden and very intense combat training being effectively forced upon them. Not that she or her team were complaining, of course.

It was actually extraordinarily difficult to get good combat training with other teams, especially when the good teams were all holding their cards close to their chest and trying to keep any advantage that they might have against the other teams. The same couldn't be said for the lower-level teams, but they were weak enough that there was no real challenge in fighting them, and they weren't ever likely to be able to match them any time soon.

Julia's team sat somewhere in the middle of it all, having only really completed half and a bit of their training overall. So while they weren't necessarily expected to be astounding combatants, the impressive teams would have already shown themselves to be as such by now.

It was just another systematic failing of the AASAU and their approach to 'training' Linked, if you asked Julia. While, sure, they should spend time and money on those that delineated themselves from the rest of the pack, there were so many of those that sat in the middle who could easily shine if they were given the resources to train.

Their coach had done the best she could, but she was only a small cog in a large system, so when Osmium himself had shown up to take them to training, there had been a small amount of hope that they were being recognised. Recognised for having potential, or anything really.

The truth was slightly less flattering. David—as Osmium now preferred to be called—had simply been paying out on a favour he owed, and they were going to be fighting one of the aforementioned weak teams. A team that had only just started actual combat training on an accelerated path.

Initially they'd been dismayed, having been paired with a team where they would effectively be teaching the other team just by fighting them. The deal was clearly lopsided, but even when Ren had raised the issue to David, he'd simply been shot down with a solemn sentence. They'd felt as if they were being used for a while, a few days where not much was changing, even if they were getting better in general.

They were mostly pleasant to be around, and it was way more fun than the other types of training that they could have been doing by a country mile, but it still wasn't all that beneficial to them. Sure, it gave them all some benefit, with control and general fighting tactics, but it wouldn't help them at the end of the week when they needed to go up against another team, one that was likely going to be a stronger than their training partners.

Then Wednesday came and things changed, so severely that there was no way that they could be ready for it. Whatever they had seen happen that day while they were eating had changed everything about them.

That day, Ajax had beaten Ren. Not just a little bit either. He had beaten Ren handily, and continued to play at an even playing field with Ren. What had changed to allow Ajax to beat Ren so easily, who had shown himself to be far better in a fight over days of practice?

Julia probably wasn't the first to figure it out, with that particular honour likely going to June or Jamie, but she was first to vocalise it at breakfast on the Friday.

"Do you think…" Julia piped up at the almost entirely silent table, each of the team members sitting around it too busy thinking about the upcoming training than speaking, "well, something happened right? To the Undefined team." Julia said eventually, backpedalling from her point rather than jumping straight to her conclusion first.

"Clearly." Jamie droned sardonically, though Ren gave the slightly irate woman a warning look and turned to nod himself.

"Ajax was hesitant about using his axe in combat before, but now he uses it freely," the green-haired man ran his fingers through the freshly cut hair that he put in the compost bins that administration had set up for him just this morning, "though he hasn't become cruel or angry. Just focused."

"So they needed something to 'focus' them up, right? There was an incident that made it all real for them, because before…" Julia internally grimaced at the memory she'd pulled up, "even after I'd explained what happens on Saturday, Walter didn't seem too worried about it."

"Mirah is now dodging three of my hits before I take her down." June said, her voice quiet and continually surprising due to its high tone in comparison to her looming, spindly form. The rest of the team filled in the sentence that should likely had surrounded those words, making even the sour-faced Jamie nod in her high collared hoodie.

"Aaliyah is scary." Jamie said softly, "She's not good at fighting like I am, but she pulls these tricks out of nowhere, and I can't see them coming. I don't even think she's showing her full hand with her link either."

"Walter…" Julia didn't shrink exactly, but she got close to it, "he was so sweet and enthusiastic at the start. But now he trains like he's going to try and kill someone."

The table's atmosphere darkened a shade deeper, each of them remembering a moment where they had looked in the eyes of their training partner and wondered—just for a split second—whether they were training, or actually fighting each other.

"Do we say something about it to David? Maybe we could ask to stop training with the–"

"No." It was June's words that sliced through Ren's conciliatory gesture, shredding it before the team's eyes. Julia could only watch as Jamie's face crunched into a menacing scowl as she eyed down the taller woman.

"Oh shut it beanstalk, you're only saying that because you want to win one over on Mirah. You're not even training anything worthwhile like that!" Jamie kept her voice just below a yell, not quite travelling to the other tables that surrounded them. The tall woman glared back at Julia, seemingly preparing herself to fight against at least her and Julia, with Ren usually electing to take no side and simply guide the argument as best he can.

"I agree with June." Julia said, her voice crystalline clear in the muddied beginnings of the argumentative atmosphere. Jamie whipped her eyes to her, shock and a slight hurt marring her expression. Julia usually sided with Jamie, not only because they were friends, but because Jamie usually made the right call.

But in this case, the 'right' call, may very well be the wrong one. Jamie looked for safety and reliability, and this new situation was not exactly either. But it was an opportunity, to grow and learn instead of taking what came to them easily.

"I think we should continue to train with them as much as we can. Something big happened to them, and it's driving them through the roof." Julia was surprised with how clear and decisive her crystalline voice was, but gave each of the table's shocked occupants a steady look to hide it, though they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

"I think we should ride their wave."

---

​

Julia bounced desperately away from a beam of fire that spewed forth from Walter's hands, only just managing to dodge the fire that seemed to work differently than most fire control abilities that she'd seen talked about online. Most either had the ability to create fire, or control fire, where Walter seemed to be close to possessing both. At least to some extent, where flames not created by him where impossibly difficult for him to manipulate with any efficiency it seemed.

The fire was usually created from some physical reaction, usually chemical in nature, which came along with a significant morph to the Linked's body, and the control was linked strongly with hypercognitive abilities like the different types of control over object, gasses, liquids, and energies, such as telekinesis.

Walter, though, seemed capable of both, and he was getting better at it fast. At first, he'd just try to follow her bounding form around with one of his hands, aiming to hit her with the end of his flames, but that was almost entirely useless. Not only was she a small and quick moving target, any of the lower-temperature flames that would scathe her would do next to no damage to her at all.

She was extremely resilient against heat, and even intense heats would take a good while for them to come close to affecting her. She could likely survive the combustion of jet fuel, though it wouldn't be pleasant.

But Julia quickly began to realise that Walter's flame? It could get really, really hot.

Slowly, as he worked out just how much heat she could take, the man continued to increase the temperature bit by bit, soon making the flames so hot that even having it scathe her skin would quickly start boiling the liquid that she instinctually used as a layer of defence against fire, regardless of her resiliency.

From what was almost just a game of Julia playing along and dodging the man's beams of fire as she tried to get anything out of training, to what was now scarily close to a mortal game of skip-rope. If the man could raise the already bright white flame to beyond that heat? It wouldn't take much for it to go straight through her outer layer and begin to eat into whatever that might be important within.

Thankfully, the man hadn't raised the temperature of the much slimmer beams of flame, with either there being a trade-off too large to make for it to be practical, or that Walter understood from her reactions that he had well and truly reached dangerous levels for her.

The next step after that, however, had been the control element of his link.

Julia jumped over yet another beam of flame, it swinging underneath her as Walter's hand angled the beam while he ran to where he believed to be a safer location. Julia, however, had other plans. With a massive bound, she rocketed towards her opponent like a rubber ball, making his eyes widen as he struggled to get the best information to his brain as quick as possible.

She stretched out her form, sacrificing the speed she had for the wide, blanket-like form she took to smother Walter into the ground like she had every match so far. But just as she drew close enough to see the exact minutia of his face, she realised that he was far too calm in comparison to the expression he normally made when he knew his time was up after a fight that had gone on far too long.

It was with a momentary horror that Julia noticed that both of his palms were spewing white flames, but even worse, he had tricked her with the lack of movement from his palms. The beams of flame themselves, though…

Two pillars of white fire appeared within Julia's vision, both of them being right in the path of her spread out body, and not wide enough apart that she'd be entirely safe even when she pulled herself back into her regular form. However, she had no choice, with her spread form probably not being resilient enough to withstand the flames without some sort of injury. She pulled her body in, relinquishing all control to pull in her as tightly as she possibly could, going a dark purple to only just be scathed by the burning pillars.

She desperately tried to regain control from the forced, almost instinctive action of self-preservation, but she'd lost a massive amount of momentum, making her fall just short of Walter's body where she might have been able to smother him to eke out a win, but it looks like she'd have to rely on a backup strategy.

As her body touched the ground, she compressed herself slightly, preparing herself to make a jump and use all of that force to ram straight into Walter's chest, but just as she looked towards where she wanted to batter into him, all she saw were two, glowing hands.

And then fire.

But not the white-hot fire that she'd been accustomed to, something that she could feel with the boiling of the liquid on her outer membrane, though she felt no pain. This fire was warm instead, a much lower temperature to the point where she stopped dead still in her tracks, the moment of shock overcoming her need to bound into the man, or away from the flame.

As the flame battered uselessly, she heard Walter's voice call out with a powerful yell.

"Death blow!"

And that was when there was a sharp snap of fingers from David's direction, mutely demanding the end to their round of combat. Julia sat, frozen as she watched the flames disappear from her vision, only Walter's hands remaining only thirty centimetres from her surface. It was with a sudden rapture that she realised that he could have very well killed her, if only he had raised the temperature of his fire.

She looked towards June and Jamie, both of them still fighting with their own opponents, but knowing, deep in her heart, that they would fall soon as well.

It was only a matter of time, in the face of people with so much willpower.


A/N: Heya! Hope you're all having a great time reading recently, as writing has been pretty good as of late. The new chapters I'm writing are great, and Walter is getting into his own sort of mischief in that chapter as well!

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 62: Ante

"Training room: dummy, armoured." Ajax called out, his voice clear and authoritative, even bouncing off the room's metallic walls to add more to the ambiance of Ajax's strangely calm emotions.

After Aaliyah had said her piece, and the night of solid sleep that had come after it, Ajax had felt the dust settle within him to a relative peace. He had known a little about Aaliyah, just from how she'd acted, and how she'd contrasted with Mirah, but he hadn't expected her past to be as… involved as it was.

The Monarch was a name they all knew, even Mirah had more than likely heard it. They all knew that him and his gang had ruled the street trade, and just how obscenely dangerous they could be when provoked. If what Aaliyah had said was true, then the feats he'd pulled of were beyond impressive, even with as heinous as they were.

Because he wasn't a Linked. He had no info link, or any link that controlled thoughts and perceptions, not like the media and those brave enough to speculate on the on the Monarch had suspected.

Aaliyah, too, hadn't had a link when she'd been the Monarch. The idea was almost harrowing to Ajax, thinking of a young Aaliyah as she took her father's position and braved that world unflinchingly, without even the protection of her rage to cloak her skin in red.

Ajax closed his eyes against the vision of himself, standing within the bunker from so long ago, holding his red axe with a desperate plea to any who might listen—to allow him to stop those three monsters as the ground tremored and crumbled, becoming dust before his eyes. Then the terrible faces, weathered and worn by the sun and heat of the Australian outback, wearing grins like skulls of insanity as they burned the world to ash to please their horrible minds.

Ajax opened his eyes to see the armoured concrete dummy in front of him, covered in a layer of linktech metal that Ajax peered into with a neutral gaze, seeing a slight reflection of himself in it's far from polished surface, distorted into only a vague semblance of coloured shapes.

The red of his axe, however, reflexed brightly enough for him to see its defined shape.

This axe, it was a reminder and an answer to the plea that he'd made so desperately. The answer hadn't come in time, not for his grandparents, or for those that he'd lived with for years of his life. They were all gone, the town as abandoned as any other that'd been touched by the Wastelanders. It was their territory now.

That was the difference between Aaliyah and him. She'd faced her evil head on, baring her teeth and taking a chunk out of its flesh bite after bite. But Ajax had run, even with the power he'd gained. He'd stolen away into the night, hiding amongst the trees of a forest created by a Linked who'd long since passed. He'd used his power for mediocre things, mundane things, and his axe had been unsatisfied.

Of course it had been. It had sat on that wall for decades, probably, waiting for someone to pick it up and use it for its intended purpose. To protect others, to be utilised with a clear intention of defending against whatever dangers it could defend against.

Then Ajax had picked it up, and it had sung, but only a moment too late.

He'd left it all behind, tricking himself into thinking that he was content to waste his days among the trees he'd wandered for countless days. Interacting with others only occasionally, when he could no longer resist the urge to talk to someone, if only a few words.

And then Tracker had found him within the woods, fittingly. She'd offered him a chance, a team of Undefined Linked. He'd known his link was undefined, it was too volatile and odd to be anything but.

But now he stood in front of this armoured dummy, his mind clear and calm, and he wasn't so sure that he felt that way any longer. Undefined? Maybe, with its indeterminant power and uncontrollable flux. But if Ajax let the calm change, ever so slightly…

Power.

Ajax's body felt like it was being shocked with lighting, the burst of astounding power coursing through his muscles like wildfire. Yet, he stayed just as calm as ever. If you asked Ajax what had changed, he might not be able to give you a genuine answer, only because he wouldn't be able to put it into words.

He'd overcome no emotional hurdles. He hadn't railed against an unbeatable foe. None of his sudden advancement made any sense in the context of the comic book power-ups that he'd read in those that Walter had recommended him.

Except one series. Reyah: The Silver Goddess. It was one of the biggest, yet its greatest criticisms were that it had no stakes because the titular character was so overwhelmingly powerful, simply 'finding' the power within herself whenever she encountered a problem.

Yet, was that not what Ajax had just done?

Aaliyah had simply told the story of her revenge, of the horrible moments that preceded the deaths she'd caused, had orchestrated. But in that story, Ajax had placed it up against his own, and he found himself severely lacking. He'd given up, and he'd only come back half-heartedly, believing that it would be enough, and if worst came to worst, he'd simply find himself back in that forest.

Then Walter, then Mirah, then Aaliyah. Then Heroes and corruption, and a world left to rot as it defiantly allowed itself to die, rejecting any extended hands to sit in the black sludge that gently pulled it deeper into the depths of despair.

All that had happened, was that Ajax had realised that the Wastelanders were winning. Entropy had come to subsume them all, forcing the world to resign itself to 'fate', and all the while, those who say atop it all grinned with all their evil, enjoying watching it all end around them.

Ajax looked down at his red axe, the might flowing from it in a massive surge as it sang with glee, begging him to continue, to fulfil the purpose that it had Awakened from its dull slumber for. Now, Ajax could hear its voice as it reinforced his ideas, adding to the chorus of power diffusing through him.

He returned his gaze to the reinforced dummy just in front of him and stared at it with a powerful gaze, far surer than he'd ever been in his entire life. It had taken years for him to come to his understanding, and many little moments of acknowledgement, but he now knew with a fierce conviction…

He would protect, and he'd spend his life doing it.

Ajax took a step towards the dummy, then another, punctuating his thoughts with the massive strides. He used everything that his body could give him in that moment, taking his axe and holding it tight, moving his tall body and powerful muscles with a fluid ease that he'd practiced over days and days of fighting.

And he swung.

The edge of the axe screamed through the air with a roaring power, pushing against the air strongly enough that it made it burst outwards from the edge, battering it away as if he'd truly sliced it. The edge soon came into contact with the armoured dummy, and while it gave the axe's head a momentary pause, the axe cleaved through, grinding the concrete within into an explosion of dust and shrapnel as it easily sliced the entire dummy in half and exiting from where its other side once was.

Ajax stood still for a moment, staying in the end of his swing for another few seconds as he let the dust and rubble settle around him, then turning to see the thoroughly destroyed dummy, pieces of its warped metal and obliterated concrete littering the room. Yet, what was most impressive was not just that, but the massive gash in the wall that sat behind it.

Ajax looked at the gash with a thoughtful gaze. Its only real explanation was that the edge of the axe itself had projected itself forwards, ripping through the metal wall just as it had the dummy. He nodded, having found an answer to satisfy him, and turned his mind to something else entirely.

"Training room: finish training." He said as he turned his back from the ripped metal and watching the wall lift and allow him to duck under it and leave the training room, and the private gym beyond it.

Lunch break was over, it was time for more fighting.

---​

Ren stood in the smaller arena, arms crossed in consternation as he watched the others from both his team, and their training partners file in after the lunch break. The trainers had been here what seemed like the entire time, silently observing for the most part as per usual.

What had Ren in such a tizzy wasn't anything to do with the trainers, of course. It was the little rift in his own team that had formed, a rare conflict between Julia and Jamie. Not only that, however, but also because Ren was struggling.

He watched idly as the tall form of his own training partner walked through the door. Well, not quite idly, not with the slight tenseness he felt in his own jaw as his body instinctively ramped up for a fight. It wasn't so much anxiety as it was a learned focus. Ren had fought against the other man for hours at this point, and he wasn't foolish enough to believe that he'd sit atop the other man for very long.

The massive man, who was now aligning himself across from Ren, had slowly been encroaching on Ren's dominance. He'd been totally unable to compete at the beginning, but Ren had been the first to fall when Ajax had gotten serious. Now Ren kept his lead over the man, probably winning six to seven matches out of every ten.

"Are we ready?" Ren said softly as he eyed the other man, having long since been able to control when they started and ended their own battles. The titan of a man looked down at the much shorter man and nodded solemnly. Ren felt his throat gulp as his mind suddenly comprehended the other man's massive size in comparison to his own.

Unbidden, sweat reached the surface of his skin as he locked eyes with the other man's mundane brown eyes, though Ren could almost swear that they had changed tone ever so slightly, becoming a lighter shade than they had been before.

As was custom, they bumped fists and moved a few metres out from each other, with Ajax pulling his red fire axe from the Velcro holster at his side and Ren growing out his hair to a length that allowed it to rest on the floor. They stood across from one another for a tense moment, and then, with an unspoken signal…

The fight began.

It was Ren that moved first, his hair lifting to surround him in somewhat of a halo, then quickly lashing out towards Ajax, almost acting as if they could pierce through Ajax's skin. Of course, they couldn't and instead they were just taking the most direct paths to their targets.

Ajax, with his axe in hand, stood entirely still and allowed his body to be entirely covered by the long strands of what Ren lovingly called 'plant fibres' which always prompted a chuckle from Ajax. But today, as he was quickly covered by the grass hair and wrapped in a tight bondage, he wasn't interested in the mutual training approach that they'd been taking.

No, he wanted a true challenge, and he needed to show that he was serious for the other man to up his game, to fight like they were truly fighting. He watched as his axe arm was covered most heavily, and Ren watched on in a focused persistence.

It was Ajax's greatest weakness, needing the use of his arm to swing his axe. Disabling that, of course, disabled much of his power overall. Ren wasn't quite ready to call it a match, even if he logically believed that there wasn't much that the other man could even do…

But that look that Ajax had given him still remained in his mind, forcing his hand into wrapping Ajax's arm with yet another layer of hair, doubling down with that small irrational fear in his heart. The other man kept his gaze down at the arm that had been wrapped in green hair, befuddlingly unconcerned to Ren. By any logical account, Ren had the man checkmated, and he had just let it happen.

Ren watched the man's face anxiously as he looked at his bound arm unconcernedly. Then Ajax raised his eyes to Ren, staring into his eyes with a gaze like stone.

"I'm sorry, Ren. It's time to up the ante." And with that simple sentence, he pulled.

It was no simple pull either, it was the equivalent of tearing a phonebook with your bare hands, no tricks or cheats. When phonebooks still existed, at least. Ren watched on in horror as the man pulled straight through the massive amount of strands, then even mortification as he felt Ajax grab onto the torn grass hairs and pulling, forcing the Japanese born man through the air and skittering across the ground towards where Ajax stood.

Ren tried to cut the hairs before he was pulled the whole way, but when he felt Ajax's hand grab the roots of the hair, right up against his scalp, he knew it was all over. Ajax lifted the other man up with one arm, staring almost dispassionately at him as his face rose to be equal with his own, holding the man almost a foot off the ground.

"I've crushed you, Ren." He said powerfully, only centimetres away from the man's face, letting his voice reverberate through his body like a drum, "Now you have to match me."

Ajax turned, letting his eyes scan over the room's other occupants, all of them watching them as they had started long before the others. Ajax Nephus' eyes met with one other person's, holding it iron clad and giving it an intense smile.

"Aaliyah," he said to his teammate, eyes blazingly powerful, "now it's your turn."


A/N: Wrote a nice chapter today, pleased with it! Hope you all enjoy the chapter

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

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 63: Line

Watching the man move had been terrifying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, he simply pulled himself free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was like them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Aaliyah was no longer there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 64: Humbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 65: Unlikely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"One last bout. All stops pulled."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 66: Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 67: Confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He hoped.

---

​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confidence was nice.


A/N: Thank you to my two new patrons, Eric and Jesper B.! You're probably both gorgeous!

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

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