by Aer-ki Jyr
The Knight took four more hits while passing up into view, one of which came from Rafa. Oni disappeared from view and ran through the rocks, rounding a curve and heading straight for Rafa. Her pursuer appeared two seconds later, charging hard and a bit awkwardly towards the trainee.
Rafa unloaded as many shots as he could into the Knight’s chest, firing directly over Oni’s head, the last of which was joined by four other shots that hit his black armor just as he caught up to and swung at Oni, missing by inches as she instinctively dove into a somersault and rolled through the grass just in front of the boulder that Rafa stood on.
The Black Knight stumbled as more stingers hit him, but succeeded in bringing his sword down on top of Oni and taking her out of the fight as two more trainees climbed up on nearby rocks and added their fire to the small kill zone in which the Knight now stood. He slashed up at Rafa, but didn’t quite have the reach, then fell to a knee as the repetitive stinger hits took their toll.
Rafa pumped his rifle’s trigger as fast as he could, adding more and more paint to the already green-plastered black armor, combining his shots to those of the five other trainees as they brought the Knight down to both knees. When his sword fell out of his hand Rafa’s heart seemed to do a double pump out of sheer joy, but he knew better than to celebrate and kept firing.
Thirty seconds later Zack lowered his weapon and held up his open palm in a signal to stop. He climbed down off the rocks and cautiously approached the Black Knight, who was lying prone on the ground, apparently unconscious. Rafa and the others also climbed down, belatedly realizing that there were still snipers about, but so far they hadn’t opened fire on them. Perhaps the trainers were as shocked as they were that they’d actually taken down the Black Knight.
Vic carefully walked up to the armored giant and picked up his long stun sword and pulled it out of his reach…but the Knight didn’t so much as twitch in response. “This thing is heavy,” he commented, swinging it about experimentally as a blue paint splatter hit the rock wall beside him. On reflex all the trainees dove for cover.
“We’ve still got a challenge to complete,” Rafa yelled to the others. “Let’s make good on it.”
The surviving six trainees began working their way through cover, Vic now carrying the Black Knight’s sword in place of his stun stick, and tracked down the closest of the snipers. One good thing about the stingers was the paint smears they left behind on the rocks, which made it easy to identify the angles of fire and backtrack them to their sources.
Rafa took down the first sniper from the flank as the others drew his fire. The trainer slumped over in his harness, attached to an elevated branch in one of the trees, and Rafa moved under his position, sighting the next sniper as Vic motioned in the approximate direction. The moving leaves in another tree made for a dead giveaway each time the sniper fired, now that he knew where to look.
He exchanged hand signals with Lens, who was closer to the target than he was, directing him to the spot. On cue, Vic popped out of cover as a distraction, drawing the fire of not one, but two snipers as Lens took down the first.
Now where’s the other one? Rafa thought.
Back in the small grassy clearing between the rocks the Black Knight lay still on the ground as his armor slowly absorbed the stun charge saturating its hardened plates. When the stun-hungry material had finished eating up the latent charge, it began pulling the energy out of the Black Knight’s body, returning him to consciousness within twenty seconds. He stayed on the ground for another minute as feeling returned to his body and the trainees moved on, tracking down the snipers.
Once adequately destunned, the Black Knight climbed to a shaky knee and held the position, needing a few more seconds before he could walk again. He pulled his arms together and touched his wrists, activating his stun gloves as he listened for the sounds of weaponsfire and deduced the approximate location of his targets.
Rafa and the rest of the 8s were halfway through the park when Hans made a quick dash between rocks and the snipers didn’t fire at him. Rafa thought maybe he’d caught them off guard, but when Vic advanced a few seconds later and there was still no shots fired he wondered if the snipers were repositioning to flank them or had pulled back towards the finish area to double up their firepower just when the Black Knight caught up to them, punching Zack in the back before he could even turn around.
Rafa glanced to his right in disbelief as he turned around out of reflex and fired on the Knight. He hit him with two shots before Vic came into view from behind and hit the black armored giant with his own stun sword.
The Black Knight stumbled forward a bit, then casually turned around and caught Vic’s next swing on the blade and held it firm. He yanked the sword towards him, bringing Vic with it when he refused to let go. The Knight kicked out his legs and dumped him to the ground while shrugging off the stingers coming from Rafa and now Hans as well. He reached down and punched Vic in the chest, stunning him unconscious.
The Black Knight touched his wrists together, deactivating the gloves and picking up his sword by the hilt before running after Hans, who quickly retreated out of view, but he didn’t last long. Without the ability to sustain massed fire they knew they had no chance against their nemesis.
Rafa was the last of the trainees to be taken down, running across the park in a vain attempt to reach the finish area, hoping either the snipers wouldn’t fire and give him a chance of winning the scenario, or that they would take him down before the Knight did. Attacking him one on one was futile…at least against the snipers he stood a small chance of evasion.
Neither possibility came to pass. The snipers held their fire as the Black Knight used his superior speed and ran Rafa down some 200 meters before he got to the finish area. The last thing he heard was the quick stomp of boots behind him before a blunt tip lodged itself in his back and everything went black.
8
Paul and Jason exchanged lunges and parries with deactivated stun sticks in one of several small sparring rooms in Atlantis, trying to expand and sharpen their skills. There were three individual challenges that directly involved the short weapons, but it wasn’t for the sake of increasing their scores that they were practicing…both they and the other 98 trainees were desperate to find a way to defend themselves against the Black Knight.
It had been four months since he’d first appeared, and to date none of the teams had been able to take him down. The 8s’ brief moment of glory had been their last, and no one had been able to render him unconscious since then. It seemed he was learning as fast as they were, and every technique they used to try and counter his attacks he eventually adapted to…if not outright shrugged off.
They key problems when facing him were his speed and skill with the sword. While the Black Knight’s lack of a ranged weapon was the trainees’ biggest advantage, his speed countered it in most cases, allowing him to close ranks alarmingly fast and dispatch with any snipers they attempted to deploy, and ever since his near defeat on blood gulch he’d taken care to keep out of the open save for when making a kill. As a result, it was nearly impossible to amass enough firepower for a prolonged period of time, sufficient to disable him.
The stun sticks, however, held much more charge than the stingers did, so the trainees could conceivably disable the Black Knight quicker if they utilized hand to hand combat…preferably in concert with ranged snipers. The problem was, the Knight’s blade was more than twice as long, and he had the strength to break through any ‘stops’ the trainees could make with their stun sticks, meaning every attack he made had to be diverted away at an angle since the massive amount of force he delivered couldn’t be abruptly canceled out with a conventional block.
Even when some of the trainees had stood toe to toe with him, they hadn’t lasted more than a few moves, for the Black Knight wasn’t only stronger and faster than they were, he was also more skilled. That, Paul and Jason had come to believe, was where they needed to focus their attention. If they could i
mprove to the point where they could last 10 seconds against him, or 20, or 30…then he would either have to retreat or stay in approximately the same position while their snipers picked him apart. Combat duration, it seemed, was the only way to counter his omnipotence.
The pair of 2s had been sparring for over an hour, utilizing one of two individual training blocks allotted to them during the day. Their schedules varied wildly, but they always had at least one 2-hour training block during which they could increase their base fitness or hone their skills. There was no testing involved during these hours, and the trainees could proceed as they chose. Paul, as well as most of the others, got in a daily run of at least 10k under 40 minutes. Some of them went longer, some shorter, but 6.2 miles seemed to be the agreed upon standard.
Paul had already completed his run first thing in the morning, then had 3 hours’ worth of individual challenge work, followed by an hour of ‘Dino class’ in which the trainees were continually updated on discoveries made within the Antarctic pyramid, which mostly consisted of additional parts of the database being translated. There was so much information already available to them that they had a backlog of material to work through, but neither they nor their instructors were rushing through any of it.
Each day they would have a new lesson covering a tiny piece of the greater mystery that was the V’kit’no’sat and their empire. Today’s lesson had been an introduction to the species known as Hjar’at…otherwise known as the Stegosaurus, including images from the distant past that were considerably different from the conceptualizations made by paleontologists and movie directors. The bone-like spines on their backs and tails were in fact clear as glass and, like a Human’s fingernails, would regrow when broken off.
They also were not fat and cumbersome as pop culture portrayed them. Their bulk was muscular and lean, lending them far more agility than their size inspired. Paul was shocked when he saw an image of a small one roll up in a ball and do a somersault forward, resting only on its back spines, which he realized must have been made of incredibly strong material.
But most remarkable of all was the images of the Hjar’at at night. Somehow they could induce their spines to glow a neon blue, from which they appeared to also emanate some form of energy arcs, leaping from one spine to another. So far the researchers in the pyramid hadn’t been able to recover any information about that particular attribute, and the instructors had encouraged the trainees to form their own speculations.
After their class had finished the trainees had a brief lunch, then more academic work. The 2s had a navigation class, which delved heavily into the mathematics of inertial force, gravity, and thrust. The class was a prerequisite for entering the naval warfare challenges, of which the 2s were scheduled to begin approximately 5 months later, if their current score progression held.
A short team workout on the ‘ring out’ course followed, with one serious attempt at upping their best score on the playground of elevated platforms connected by suspension bridges, zip lines, and flat topped pillars…all of which had no guard rails of any kind and were constructed several meters above thick red mats that spread out beneath the course like the water beneath an erratically constructed dock.
They managed to chip off three seconds, which increased their team score a negligible amount, then they split up for more individual training, with Paul and Jason opting for some creative sparring practice.
They’d found that if one wasn’t careful, their movements would become repetitive and predictable…something that they truly could not afford, and while there were specially assigned martial arts instructors that they could practice with, Paul and Jason had developed a knack for figuring out the capabilities of each new piece of equipment given to them…some of which the designers hadn’t foreseen.
The stun sword that the Black Knight used was not part of their current equipment inventory, and it was debated whether it ever would be, so the trainees had to do their best to create sparring challenges with the short stun sticks to simulate the longer sword…which never truly worked.
At the moment Jason was using two stun sticks against Paul’s one, trying to force each other into unfamiliar defensive and offensive patterns, figuring that the more comfortable they were with the weapons the better chance they had of improvising against the Black Knight’s blade, thus the point of the current sparring exercise was to make the opponent as uncomfortable as possible.
The trick of the matchup was in overcoming the leverage force applied by the single blade vs the double strike capacity of the pair, and vice versa. When engaging the Black Knight the trainees were automatically at a leverage disadvantage, given his superior strength, so Jason was being forced to deflect Paul’s attacks, whereas Paul had the option of brute force stopping Jason’s strikes at any moment, though if he did so he opened himself up to the opposite blade.
It was an awkward arrangement at first, but with successive days of practice they’d both gotten fairly good at their combat ‘dance’ and continued to press each other as often as they could, marking each other with light bruises from their successful blows. Paul always kept to the single stick, and Jason the double when sparring with each other, but they each practiced with different combinations, including the use of handheld shields, when sparring with other trainees, most of whom were 2s given the differences in team scheduling.
After the first week Paul had to admit that there was a lot of room for improvement in what had originally looked to be very simple, straightforward movements…but he also realized with a measure of disgust just how much time it would take to become proficient with the weapons. Skill had to be earned, he knew, with time and training…and despite the huge gains he and the others had made since the beginning of their training, it was painfully obvious how far they still had to go.
He hated to admit it, but in some ways he was still just a newb.
That thought more than anything drove him to work harder and longer at sparring practice, a mindset that Jason shared. The Black Knight had taken their egos and smashed them flat dozens of times, showing them in painful clarity just how skilled they weren’t and never relenting in his vicious determination to see them fail. That personal aspect to the ambushes ate at the trainees even more, given their inability to settle the score.
That said, they had no choice in the matter. Their training and challenges continued on, with most of them not interfered with by the Black Knight. His appearances were truly random, as far as the trainees could deduce, or rather failed to deduce any pattern to his attacks. They had to go into each team challenge with the knowledge that he might show up, and then have the guilt of their anxiety to deal with when he didn’t. It seemed he was in their heads even when he wasn’t on the course.
The trainers, however, absolutely loved the situation, though they denied it and the Black Knight’s very existence when questioned about it. Their most common response was ‘What Black Knight?’ followed by an uncongenial smile.
Paul and the others had to admit, in private, that when training to face the overbearing dominance of the V’kit’no’sat at some point in the hopefully distant future, the Black Knight was giving them excellent practice in the art of getting one’s ass kicked. Someday Paul hoped he could meet the mystery man outside his armor, at which point he’d shake hands, mount a step stool, and punch him in the face.
One other lesson the trainees were learning was that of hate…both the advantages and disadvantages of the emotion. Up until now Paul had never truly understood the word, but given the four serious injuries inflicted upon him, and the dozens of others received by his teammates, Paul had an intricate understanding of the concept and the powerful motivation it provided…which was also why, he figured, that a lot of the Dino class lessons centered on the bloody history and oppression of the V’kit’no’sat. Not only to inform them of the dangers they faced, but to allow them to feel a connection to what otherwise would appear to be nothing more than a farfetched storyline.
Several recordings of atrocities against both Humans and other races contained within the pyramid’s databanks had made that connection all the more real, distant in the past though it was.
All together, the magnitude of the task placed before them was overwhelming, but the Black Knight had given them a tangible, superior opponent to face and adapt to, unlike the V’kit’no’sat who were distant and unknown. That fueled the trainees’ competitive fires and laced their reactive instincts and would, in time, come to be seen as the most beneficial part of their training…though only in retrospect. At the moment, each of the 100 trailblazers hated the bastard with a passion that drove them to find a way to defeat, or at least survive, one of his attacks.
When Jason and Paul finished sparring, they split up and finished their last hour of training with swimming and Jujitsu, respectively, then hit the showers with the others at the end of the day, swapping stories, playing games, and sleeping for those needing a few extra hours of shuteye. For the 2s, the following day would see them advance into a new series of challenges, of which the 7s, 3s, and 9s had already progressed.
Tomorrow their mission would be to escort a non team member through a new course to a finish location, protecting him/her in the process, as well as using the individual’s technical skills to make their way to target. Paul was leery about that aspect of the challenge, but knew it was something they would have to get used to. Star Force employed a wide range of experts, none of which he would expect to have any training remotely similar to his own, but potentially with skills they would need to exploit in the field.
That said, it was still a step closer to graduation and Paul allowed himself to savor the moment of transition, wondering what Davis had in store for them after they’d completed their training.
