Almost at once the edges of his vision began to darken, and alarm at the prospect of passing out in such a secluded place offered Rei a surge of adrenaline that had his eyes opening wide. He could still feel unconsciousness coming fast, his body unable to tolerate the shock of bruised flesh and organs, and so he did the only thing he could.
Pulling up his NOED, he flicked to his contacts, struggling to focus on who he could call.
In the end, he selected the first name, at the top of the list, ordered alphabetically.
“Calling” an automated voice spoke into his ear just as the same message flared across his frame. The line rang once, then twice. At the third, Rei started to fear there would be no answer, but just as he began to lose the ability to keep his eyes open there was a click of acceptance, and the words changed to “Voice Call Ongoing” under his drifted lids.
“Hey!” The enthusiasm in the girl’s voice was so jarring it might have made him smile under any other circumstances. “This is a surprise. Are you done already? I’m just heading back to the dorm to get changed and meet you in the—”
“S-Subbasement 7,” Rei gasped, cutting her off, and as he spoke he tasted again the blood between his teeth. “E-Elevators. Sub… Subbasement… 7.”
He didn’t hear the answering demands, the confusion and fear that replaced the eagerness. He didn’t hear the repeated questions, didn’t hear the requests for an explanation, nor the eventual promise that she would be right there, that she was on her way, that he needed to hang on. Rei was already starting to drift, tugged down into the darkness, beneath any place where the girl’s voice could reach him.
Before the blackness took him in full, though, he blinked as his frame flashed one last time for him.
...
Processing combat information.
...
Calculating.
…
Results:
Strength: Severely Lacking
Endurance: Lacking
Speed: Lacking
Cognition: Lacking
Offense: Lacking
Defense: Severely Lacking
Growth: Not Applicable
…
Checking combat data acquisition.
…
Adequate data acquirement met.
Device initiating adjustments to:
Strength. Defense.
…
Adjustment complete.
Strength has been upgraded from Rank E6 to E7.
Defense has been upgraded from Rank E3 to E4.
“Huh,” Rei muttered to himself. “Not a complete waste of a day after all.”
And then even the lights of the lobby above him went black.
CHAPTER 30
Rei came to in the dark, and the first thing he registered was that he was in only slightly less discomfort rising out of unconsciousness as he had been falling into it.
He blinked several times as he slowly woke, taking in a dim, vaguely familiar tiled ceiling, illuminated only by the faint presence of a blue-orange light coming from his left. He made to turn his head to see where he was, but hissed and groaned as even this simple motion caused his neck to pulse and ache in discomfort. In the end he used only his eyes to look, and found himself gazing out a translucent window-wall that offered a handsome view of the Institute grounds at night, complete with the soaring glow of the Castalon’s towering skyscrapers—bright despite the late hour—rising like a crown across the horizon.
“Rei?” a tired voice asked quietly.
Rei had smartened up, and didn’t glance around too sharply, now. He shifted his head as far as he could to his right, in time to see a dark figure lifting from one of several chairs along the far wall of the large suite he’d woken up in. They left behind a second form, curled up and apparently asleep in another of the seats, and as the person approached the light of the distant city reflected off the gold buttons of a wrinkled uniform, then caught in blond hair and yellow eyes.
“Catcher,” Rei groaned, doing his best to offer his friend a grin. Even his face hurt, dammit. “Funny running into you here. Did I miss dinner?”
Catcher’s answering smile was so tight, it might have been chiseled on. “Afraid so. Too bad, too. It was steak day again.” Before the joke could continue, though, he reached the edge of the bed, taking Rei in critically. There was something new in the usually cheerful Saber’s face. Something dark and hot, and it took Rei a moment to place it.
Fury.
It was guarded, but present, a seething anger hidden behind a mask of calm.
“Do you remember what happened?” Catcher asked him quietly.
“Oh yeah,” Rei answered with a grimace. “Head as hard as mine, would be difficult to forget.”
Catcher nodded slowly. “Grant?”
“More like his fan club. Asshole didn’t even have the balls to show up himself.” Rei flinched as the angle of his neck started to ache. Rolling his head forward again, he stared at the ceiling once more. “Hospital, I’m guessing?”
Catcher nodded again. “You’ve been out for about ten hours, though I think most of that is the lieutenant major’s work.”
“Ashton?”
“Yeah. Apparently she took over your case the moment Aria carried you through the front doors.”
“Oh god,” Rei groaned, closing his eyes. If he could have covered his face without feeling like his arms would fall off, he would have. “At least tell me it was over her shoulder or something…”
“Nah,” Catcher’s usual smile sounded like it had returned a little. “Princess style. Full on. Heard it from the multiple students taking pictures.”
“Dick,” Rei snorted. Then he opened his eyes again. “Where is she? Is that her by the wall?”
“No, that’s Viv. We came running as soon as we got the call. Basically fought off Willem Mayd with a stick when he told us we could go home, and he ended up getting us some extra chairs to try and sleep when it got late.”
Rei took in the slumbering figure hidden in the dark at the back of the room. Indeed, peering closer, he could make out the shape of perfect curls, and the glow of the vysetrium in the CAD bands about the girl’s wrists was distinctly silver.
“Aria’s close by, though. Don’t worry.”
They way Catcher said it, like he was trying to hide a laugh even as he whispered, had Rei frowning at him. Catcher pointed to something on the wall behind Rei’s head.
“Want me to try sitting you up? This looks like the bed’s positioning controls.”
Rei started to nod, but when his neck protested this, too, he merely grunted an affirmative.
Catcher pressed a finger to some panel hidden from view, and with the subtle whirling of machinery the top half of Rei’s hospital mattress began to lift. It wasn’t the most comfortable transition—even this slow shift made his back and hips ache—but he was grateful for it nonetheless when Catcher brought him up to about 45 degrees of incline, giving him a better view of the room.
The room, and the girl in a plain shirt seated by his knees to his left, bent over the edge of his bed to rest her head on crossed arms atop his blankets, clearly fast asleep as her red hair cut a pattern over the green glow of her CAD bands.
“Like I said, she’s close by,” Catcher repeated with a quiet grin.
Rei didn’t answer him, looking down at Aria with a conflicting mix of emotions that had no business pressing at him in the situation at hand.
“Has she been here the whole time?” he finally asked, letting himself believe the hoarseness of his tone was related to the beating rather than anything else.
At his side, he caught Catcher’s face falling slowly back into the lines of anger.
“The whole time,” he confirmed. There was a heavy moment of silence before he seemed able to continue. “When Viv and I got here they’d already whisked you away. But Rei… Aria was a bloody mess. I mean literally. The doctors took her jacket away a
s a bio-hazard precaution. What the hell did they do to you?”
“Kicked the shit out of me and then some,” Rei grunted. “Six of them. Camilla Warren and Tad Emble among them.”
That seemed to take Catcher aback, and his eyes blazed as he stared at Rei dead-on, then. “Warren and Emble? From your Type-group?”
“Yup,” Rei said matter-of-factly, still not having looked away from where Aria slept by his legs. “Them, and four of Grant’s regular entourage.” He grit his teeth. “I should have seen it coming. Warren was suddenly acting like my best friend, and Emble was pissed about training.”
“What happened in training?” Catcher asked with surprising intensity. In the grand scheme of all Rei had just told him, Emble’s behavior seemed hardly the most pertinent topic.
“I beat him,” he answered simply. “Once, at least. After that we probably tied run-times for most of the other attempts, too.”
“Times? What did you guys do in training today?”
Rei frowned, finally glancing around at the Saber. “You guys didn’t do the agility course?”
“Agility course? Dude, do you think I went to combat training today? I’ve been here with Viv since Aria called and told us she found you beaten to a pulp.”
For a long few seconds Rei stared at Layton “Catcher” Catchwick, then. It dawned on him, in that moment. It dawned on him that—while he didn’t know if anyone would ever be able to the match the stone pillars of the relationship he and Viv had built over the years—he really, truly had more than one friend in the world, now. Catcher was chasing his own dreams, just like Rei. Just like every cadet at the Galens Institute. And yet, despite that, he had come running at the drop of a hat, and didn’t seem to have thought twice about missing a valuable day of conditioning, even in a world where that conditioning could prove the edge he needed between a life spent in ease and luxury, and one battling the archons beyond the boundaries of Sirius.
Rei made his decision, then.
“Catcher, pull up your NOED for me.”
Catcher gave him a puzzled look. “My NOED? Why?”
“Just do it, man.”
Catcher continued to watch him in confusion for a moment, but—with a bit of a resigned shrug—eventually brought out his frame as Rei did the same.
It proved trickier than Rei had anticipated to grant the Saber viewing permissions. His battered right arm barely wanted to lift on its own so he could focus on Shido and bring up the CAD’s spec options, and Catcher had tried to protest when Rei had started struggling with doing so. Ignoring him, Rei made the changes quickly, then returned his attention to the blond boy at the side of his bed.
“Before I send you this, swear to me you won’t yell and wake up the girls.”
Catcher, apparently, had gleaned what was going on, because he’d lapsed into silence again as Rei had gone about granting the permissions. He looked a little amused, though, at the request.
“You want me to promise I won’t yell? That’s it? You’re not gonna make me promise not to tell anyone?”
Rei managed a tired grin. “I’m not worried about that anymore, man.”
It was Catcher’s turn to stare, then, and Rei suspected the Saber might have been having the same sort of epiphany he’d just come to. After a few still seconds, Catcher brought up a pinched thumb and forefinger to draw them across his lips in a zipping fashion, then raised one hand like he were pledging wordless fealty.
“Good enough for me,” Rei chuckled.
Then he sent the scripted permissions over, and Catcher immediate looked down at Shido intently, his NOED blaring in a wave of up-scrolling text.
Reaching the bottom of the lists, he froze.
It was like seeing Viv take the numbers in for the first time all over again. Rei watched Catcher’s eyes trace the fateful line once, then twice, then three times. Eventually his gaze stopped moving all together, finally processing what he was seeing, and after a good 15 or 20 seconds Catcher’s neuro-optic blinked out. Even then, however, he didn’t so much as twitch, staring at nothing, his jaw hanging open in disbelief. When he at last started to turn to Rei again, he mouthed at the air, like he was trying to find the words.
Eventually, as their eyes locked, Catcher settled for making a pained face, shutting his lips tight and letting out a strained, keening sound not unlike the screeching of a teakettle.
It was honestly a more contained response than Rei had anticipated for the boisterous cadet, and he couldn’t help but smirking as Catcher finally found his words.
Or some of them, at least.
“I… You… Your CAD… I…”
He seemed unable to string together a coherent sentence, but Rei sat patiently, knowing too well the incredible nature of what he’d just revealed. There were several more attempts at speech made, but finally Catcher took a breath, steadying himself, and got out a single, straight statement.
“Tell me you’re not pulling my leg.”
“I’m not pulling your leg,” Rei responded dutifully, which didn’t seem to please the Saber in the least.
“Seriously, Rei. Tell me you’re not messing around. You didn’t spoof that, did you? Because Viv’s told me you’ve talked about messing with your NOED, and—”
“It’s not faked, man. It’s one hundred percent legit. Honestly I kinda thought you’d have already had your suspicions. You said a month ago you had an idea of what was going on.”
“And I was right on the money! But this…” Catcher shook his head slowly. “I thought there was something going on with your Growth man. I nailed that. For the admissions board to let you in, I figured you had to have the potential to really blow the roof off this place in the long-run, or they wouldn’t have taken a risk on you. But I thought you might be in the high Bs. Maybe an A by some miracle of the MIND.” He was still shaking his head as he repeated himself. “But this…”
“Yeah,” Rei said under his breath, nodding. “It’s something else…”
Catcher seemed to have nothing to say to that, and the two of them stood—or reclined, in Rei’s case—in silence for a good long while again.
Eventually, though, the Saber looked to come to some private conclusion, visibly mulling over his thoughts before sharing them.
“Well I guess that gives cause to why people are scared…”
Rei frowned around at him. “Scared?”
Catcher gave him a sidelong look as though not believing he didn’t know what he was talking about. “Oh yeah. Like Emble. I’ve got no idea what you mean about the agility course, but if it’s anything like what our parameter testing is like… Wouldn’t this be the first time you’d caught up to the class? Or someone in the class, at least?”
Rei grunted an affirmation. “Yeah, I actually thought the same thing. Selleck and the others made a big deal about making sure I knew how much ‘I didn’t belong’, but I’ve heard that noise before. I told them it was just cause they didn’t like that I was catching up.”
“Exactly,” Catcher said. “They don’t like it because they’re scared.”
Rei looked at him blankly, and the Saber sighed, giving in. “Dude… You’ve climbed from the low Es into the low Ds in less than two months. A whole tier. There’s also a rumor going around that before that started you rose up four or five ranks on your own out of the Fs. Add in Shido’s evolutions… How do you expect people to react? Do you think everyone is going to applaud you?”
“Well… Not everyone, no, but—”
“Hardly anyone, man. I’m gonna be honest with you: I’m incredibly grateful you and Viv ended up in 304 with me. I haven’t had friends like you guys in, well… ever, probably. But despite that, even I’m pretty jealous. Even I’m a little scared. Not of you, per se—I don’t really see you going all ‘evil ruler of the galaxy’ on everyone—but more of what you mean for the rest of us.” Catcher grimaced the smallest bit, suddenly looking far away, obviously taken by his own thoughts as he spoke.
“For lack of a better way of putting it: you’re about to make us look bad, Rei. All of us, and really bad. I’m not saying you should change anything,” he made sure to add quickly as Rei opened his mouth to interrupt. “I’m honestly not even saying it’s a bad thing. All I’m saying is that… that Rank…” He exhaled as he started to struggle again, blowing his cheeks out in disbelief. “Wow… Voicing it out loud really sounds absurd… All I’m saying is that S-Rank comes with a lot more weight to it than you might think, and not all of it on you.”
Rei sat, looking at Catcher somewhat at a loss for words. On the one hand he wanted to protest, to deny that Shido was anyone’s responsibility but his own, but on the other his friend’s argument had struck deep. Considering it all, Rei looked from Catcher first to Viv, curled up by the wall, then to Aria, her head still on her arms over the edge of the bed, her back rising and falling steadily as she, too, slept on.
More weight than I might think… he repeated to himself silently.
He’d contemplated it before, of course. But not to this extent. He’d pondered on the reaction people would have if—when, rather—they figured it out, even if “it” was less the specific facts and more just the base version of the truth: Rei was on a path to outstrip them all and then some. He’d known there would be dissent, of course, known there would be bad apples, but now he wondered if it wasn’t more likely to be the other way around. Had his time spent with his friends corrupted his understanding of the Users he was surrounded by? Of the cadets that made up his class and the Institute as a whole? Was Shido’s growth, even as it brought him soaring with each passing week to new heights, also going to see him dragged down by reaching, jealous hands no matter how high he climbed? He hated that visual, hated the idea that—as much as he tried to keep to his own business—there would always be others who would want to intercede.
But, at the same time, he realized that it could only be true.
Tad Emble’s face, twisted from his usually benign pleasantness first to the black frown as he’d been outstripped on the course, then furthermore as he’d held down Rei’s leg while Mateus Selleck had kicked his face in, told him it could only be true.
Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1) Page 47
