Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1)

by Bryce O'Connor

  “Dude, you’ve got serious issues,” he growled at Grant. “I don’t know what stick was shoved up your ass as a kid, but you should see about getting that removed.”

  The Mauler at last turned his attention on him, and he sneered. “Maybe I’ll take advice from you when you can hold up your promises, Ward. What was it you said you would do to me, last time we talked like this? ‘Grind my face into the field’, I think it was? How’d that work out for you in our last match?”

  Rei, for once, had no response to give, and he felt his cheeks follow the direction of Aria’s as the heat built up.

  Grant, seeing his victory, smirked, then looked between the two girls again. He seemed almost disappointed. “Whatever. I guess it’s not my place to butt in. Just remember I warned you from the start when he—” he gave Rei an eyeful over a clenched jaw “—drags you both down with him.”

  And then, before any of them could protest this statement, he stepped by, shouldering Rei out of the way to move closer to the front of the group.

  “I swear on Gemela that I’m going to make that shit-stain bleed one day,” Viv fumed, watching Grant’s broad back walked away from them.

  “Viv,” Aria hissed in warning, only for Viv to whirl on her.

  “Oh come on! Like he deserves any better! You can’t seriously be so cool-headed that—”

  “Viv!” It was Rei’s turn to whisper urgently, hoping to get her to shut up. It worked this time, fortunately, because when she looked around at him Viv, too, caught the glower they had earned themselves from Dyrk Reese, the major’s attention leveled on them with distinct displeasure.

  The three of them stood quietly for a long moment—the closest other students pulling away as though they might get contaminated with the officer’s disapproval—until Reese finally turned his attention elsewhere.

  “Funny how he didn’t give Grant any kind of stink eye,” Aria grumbled in annoyance behind Rei’s shoulder, and he had to suppress a snort.

  Not wanting to push their luck, they shared a silent agreement not to speak again until the training started. Fortunately it wasn’t more than another minute or so before the stragglers arrived from the locker room, and as soon as all twenty-six of them were gathered Reese began to address them in a clear, steady voice.

  “Good afternoon, cadets. Once again, I am Major Dyrk Reese, coordinator and head arbiter of all Galens SCTs, including the Intra-Schools. For those of you wondering at Captain Dent’s absence, I’m afraid you will have to suffer me as a replacement today, as well as frequently over the next fourteen weeks.”

  There was a muttering of curious whispers at that, but the major didn’t let it slow him down.

  “This afternoon I am present only as an observer. You will attend to your regular groups without interruption, and I hope you’ll manage to ignore my attendance and examination of your forms and abilities. It is not absent purpose, obviously.” His eyes moved steadily across the group, lingering a little too long in Rei, Viv, and Aria’s direction. “As Captain Dent is new to the Institute this year, along with my SCT responsibilities I am seeing to the oversight of your initial Team Battle and Wargame training regimen.” He had to raise his voice as 1-A immediately broke out into excited whisper. “This means that—starting next week—I will be your instructor every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoon, allowing the captain to spend additional time with the second and third year students who are expected to compete at the highest level in this years’ collegiate Dueling circuits. This also means—” he pressed on as the hubbub of anticipation pitched “—that I will be taking advantage of this opportunity to make a personal assessment of your capabilities, which I hope you are all smart enough to understand may have its own impact in the coming weeks.”

  With those words, Rei knew that he had been right.

  Reese was already on the hunt for squad-leaders.

  Unable to help himself, Rei glanced at Aria, on Viv’s other side. The way she was frowning up at the major before them, he suspected she’d deduced the same thing.

  “Coinciding with your review of squad formats under Captain Takeshi, we will begin Team Battle training Thursday.” With a wave of his hand, Reese released the Type-instructors to their duties, and they started moving at once. “I hope you will all think to review your Tactical Studies materials before then.”

  As soon as he was done, the lesser officers began their usual shouting.

  “Maulers on 6!” Lieutenant Johnson called out, already hopping off the platform.

  “Duelist to 4!” Gross announced.

  “Sabers—!”

  Telling Viv and Aria he would catch them after class, Rei started jogging towards 1, Sense—who had lingered to wait for him—stepping in at his side.

  “Squad formats,” the bald Brawler said under his breath as they approached the field Michel Bentz was already waiting by. “Awesome. I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” Rei told him as they joined Tad Emble, Emily Gisham, and Camilla Warren in a semicircle around the chief warrant officer. “I don’t imagine they’ll be tossing us into a Wargame on day one.”

  “You would be correct.”

  Bretz was watching the pair of them, and appeared to take advantage of their conversation to kick-off the morning’s lecture.

  “As Ward just said, while I know that the major’s announcement may get everyone a little hot and ready for some action, temper your expectations. Trial by fire has its place, but Team Battle and Wargame formats require precision and planning more than they do power and luck. As such, do not expect us to toss you in green and tell you all to have fun and get along. That’s just a good way to get you all developing some bad habits. And I do not intend to have any of my students developing bad habits.” The Brawler instructor glared at his five charges one after the other. “To do that, of course, means I need to hammer in some good habits. Your Tactical Studies courses have been reviewing squad formats for some time. Who can list the critical concepts of ideal group-based combat for me?”

  Rei’s hand—as was a standard in the group—was up first.

  “Let’s hear it, Ward.”

  “Communication, positioning, and advantage,” he listed at once, and Bretz nodded predictably. At Rei’s elbow, Warren told him “Nice” under her breath, and he almost looked around at her. It was a day for pleasant surprises, apparently. The dark-skinned girl had never paid him a compliment before, even as meager as this one.

  “Communication, positioning, and advantage,” Bretz was repeating. “Exactly. Simple on paper, less so in practice. Communication is handled by your Devices, and something I can only instill in you so much. Tags. Labels. The common diction of the ISCM. After that, though, you’ll have to find the right squadmates, and figure out things on your own from there. Advantage is all about taking the opportunities presented to you in combat. Situational changes. Surviving team numbers. Terrain. Everything. Again, something you will learn and develop on your own and as a squad with practice.” Bentz grinned. “Positioning, however… That’s a different story.”

  With a flash the chief warrant officer’s NOED flared, and a moment later the field beneath their feet was shifting and shimmering. As the white palettes of hexagonal pillars began to show themselves, Rei at first thought Bretz was pulling up the Speed & Agility course from the parameter testing again, and frowned. They’d been cycling into a variety of more complicated fields for weeks now, and he wasn’t keen on duking it out again somewhere so—

  He stopped, though, when he realized that the projection manifesting before him was only vaguely similar to the exam zone, and even then just in the basic building blocks of it. Indeed, as he watched, the outside thirds of the field rose as solid wedges, forming a sort of path that cut through the middle of them in a perfect line, like a sheer valley cleaved through white stone. There was nothing special about the hologram otherwise, and Rei glanced about to see that all around th
em the Lancers, Sabers, and Duelists areas had taken on the same strange manifestation.

  “Position in team-based formats can further be broken down into two parts,” Bretz was continuing his lecture, which was steadily turning into an explanation of what Rei was starting to think was going to be a very interesting training afternoon. “Information, and mobility. As Brawlers—and friends—” he added this last part with a fond smirk at Rei “—you on average possess the highest Speed and Cognition spec of every Type other than Duelists. This makes you among the most ideal of candidates for flanking, and even scouting if necessary.”

  Rei could feel the excitement bubbling up again.

  This was definitely going to be an interesting afternoon.

  “Senson,” Bretz addressed Sense as he moved to step outside of the zone perimeter. “Take a starting position, if you would. The rest of you, off the field with me.”

  As he spoke, the typical red starting circle appeared about 5 yards up the path from where they stood. Sense obeyed at once, moving into the marker, then looked around at the chief warrant officer curiously.

  “What am I supposed to do, sir?”

  “First, call your Device,” Bretz said, smiling at some private amusement. “Then… Don’t mess up.”

  As he said it, his NOED flickered, and under Sense’s feet the field began to move.

  “Whoa,” the Brawler said in surprise as he started sliding away from the starting ring, which stayed projected where it had been despite the shifting of the floor. He was barely 2 yards from the perimeter and the rest of the group when he seemed to catch on, because with a shout he summoned up his CAD, hurrying to return to the red circle. Reaching it, he started walking with the passing of the floor to stay within the marker, like he was ambling along on the world’s largest, whitest treadmill.

  “All of you, on me.”

  Rei looked away from Sense to see that Bretz was moving south, along the solid wall. After a moment he turned, and momentarily vanished up a set of steps Rei hadn’t noticed rising into the side of the uniform pillars. At a jog he and the other Brawlers followed their instructor, taking the stairs in a quick line to find themselves atop the flat semicircle to the left of where Sense was still pacing quickly in place some 10 feet below them.

  “Senson. The course will speed up now. Be ready.”

  The Brawler’s confusion at Bretz’s warning was apparent, but he only raised one green-and-black gauntlet in acknowledgement, the ivory vysetrium along the point of his punch daggers bright even against the field. As soon as he did so, the path under his feet began to move a little faster, and pretty soon he was jogging instead of walking, eyes forward on the empty “course”, as the instructor had called it.

  And then, from the end of the lane, a horizontal barrier about 3 feet tall appeared, sliding towards Sense at the same rate as the hexagonal paneling beneath him.

  “Dexterity and speed are assets every User should cultivate, but as Brawlers in particular you need to use them to your advantage.” Bretz had continued his lecture as they watched Sense vault over the low barrier with ease to stay within the red ring under him. “All of you have already experienced the value of mobility in one-on-one combat, but in squad format that mobility becomes doubly important, particularly to positioning.” At the end of the path, a flat barricade diagonally bisected the way, coming at Sense a little faster this time. “This course was initially designed as an alternative to your agility parameter test, but couldn’t be standardized without making it too easy for students to memorize the run.” As it reached him, Sense was forced to jump and push off the left wall to clear the obstacle. Landing, he almost stumbled, the path having sped up a little once again. “As it gets faster and faster, it will become more and more challenging. Your responsibility is to last as long as you can without failing. Dueling fields are often static, but in Wargames in particular the environment of the event—be it elimination or objective-based—will not be so plain. Multi-level. Shifting terrain. Ample placement for ambushing and being ambushed. You will need to be able to take it all in and adapt to it as opportunity presents itself.”

  As he said this, the end of the path arrived in a sudden staggering of lifting and dropping pillars, reaching Sense at the speed of a light run, now. The cadet managed the variation with ease, demonstrating a good eye for his foot placement and a solid Cognition spec, and eventually the obstacle flattened out again, to be replaced by a series of wide beams that bisected the path a different angles, forcing Sense to dip and dodge and jump. Managing this, he was running in full, now, and the next barrier came in the shape of two flat, triangular white sheets that rotated like fan blades across the path. Sense timed the approach right and dove through the opening, rolling and coming up on his feet in time to vault and duck into a trio of over-under repetitions through a series of low and high barriers. Clearing this, a solid wall 15 feet high came barreling at him, and the Brawler leapt to catch the lip of it with both hands, clearly looking to haul himself overtop it.

  Unfortunately, that was his first—and final—mistake.

  Sense’s Device lacked the individual jointing along his fingers that Rei’s and some of the other Brawlers enjoyed. As a result, his left hand failed to get a good grip on the top of the wall, slipping off even as the cadet tried to pull himself up. The ended with a yelp of surprise and a heavy thud of muscle and steel hitting the still-moving ground, and Sense yelled again as he was hurtled backwards towards the open rear end of the path, shoved along by the solid obstacle like a hand sweeping a table clean. When he was a single yard away from the silver line that marked the edge of the field the entire projection flashed red, and everything came to a sudden stop.

  Everything except Sense, of course, whose inertia had him hurtling over the perimeter at breakneck speed.

  There was a distortion of light, like a clear film of plastic being impacted, and a semi-solid projection caught the boy as he looked about to be catapulted across the buffer zone into Field 2’s space. It accepted his weight with an eerie lack of sound, slowing then stopping him, then apparently turned solid as Sense slid out of the dent he’d made in the strange wall in a tumble of CAD-clad limbs. Coming to a stop on his back, it seemed to take him a moment to catch up to what had happened, but when he did he picked his head up to look at his groupmates, all of whom were staring down at him with a mix of interest and alarm.

  “WOOH!” he whooped. “LET’S DO THAT AGAIN!”

  Rei wasn’t the only one to laugh, and even Bretz cracked a smile.

  “You’ll get your turn again, don’t you worry,” the instructor called down, but he was already looking around at the others. “Remember that mobility is essential, particularly for you lot. If you can make yourself fast, you can make yourself invaluable. Master your Speed. Master your Cognition. If you can do that, you will never be useless.”

  It struck Rei, then, the understanding of what exactly it was that Bretz was doing. He was already thinking ahead. He was already planning for them, planning a future in which they were essential to a squad.

  He was believing in them.

  The fire in Rei’s chest—that need to become stronger, to become better—burned just a little brighter as he watched Michael Bretz cast his confident gaze over all of his students.

  “Now,” the man continued after a moment, “after that lovely little demonstration… Who wants to go next?”

  Unsurprisingly, every hand shot up into the air at once.

  “Let’s see… Gisham. Take the lead. Then it will be Emble, Ward, and Warren.”

  Emily Gisham barely subdued an excited exclamation before she jumped off the 10-foot drop of the wall to land lightly on her feet. Sense—who’d recalled his Device and gotten to his feet—gave her a thumbs up before himself crouching and leaping up the sheer cut of the field, making it over the top to join the others. Rei, abruptly, realized that the stairs had likely been for his benefit alone, and didn’t know whether to fe
el embarrassed or grateful for the fact.

  Soon, he told himself. A little more patience.

  It was likely only a matter of time, after all, before he would be able to show off similar acrobatics.

  “Call, Gisham,” Bretz told the cadet below them, and as soon as her Device was live the field began to move. The chief warrant officer made no comment as Sense cheered the cadet’s easy managing of the first obstacle—a suspended rectangle that forced Gisham to duck under it—and not long after the rest of the Field 1 group was shouting right along as she leapt and vaulted and dove her way faster and faster along the course. She made it a good while longer than Sense had, but eventually got tripped up when a series of moving pillars dropped out from under her, causing her to lose her balance and fall. She, too, yelled in alarm as the path hurtled her backwards, but with a similar distortion of light the barrier at the end caught her safely, and she tumbled out of the rigid dent her body had made laughing.

  Emble was next, and unfortunately his run didn’t go nearly as well. He didn’t make it more than 30 or 40 seconds before his Speed failed him as he attempted to leap over a sudden swell in the path. One foot caught the lip of the hill, so instead of clearing the obstacle he ended up tumbling down the other side of it. He managed to get to his feet quickly, starting to run again, but before he could gain any momentum his slip-up had pulled him back within the invisible one-yard marker inside the perimeter, and with a flash of red Emble struck the barrier listlessly. The others, including Bretz, tried to cheer him up as the cadet rejoined them on the wall, and Rei offered him a grin as they crossed paths that Emble didn’t return.

  While getting back up would undoubtedly prove more of an issue, Rei was confident in his specs enough to drop straight down to the path below. Tucking into a roll, he came up easily enough, stepping into the starting ring.

  “Call, Ward.”

  “Call,” Rei echoed, and with a thrill he watched Shido take form around his arms and legs.