Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (25-28)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  When she figured she’d waited long enough she pulled out of a languid side splits and sat down on the floor to pull her shoes and socks off, then she walked over to the single punching bag-style target in the giant room and set herself. As she had been doing earlier, she summoned up the tingles along her spine and sent them down her right leg and into her foot. From there she kicked her leg out towards the target, coming up about a foot short of making contact and released the energy.

  The holographic display to the right showed a 13, confirming that she’d hit the target despite the fact that she couldn’t feel the impact. More often than not, when Morgan released a concussion wave her eyes were closed in concentration, so without the system’s measurement she’d be hard pressed to know if she was succeeding or not.

  She reset herself and did the same thing twice more, then switched to her left leg and likewise went through three practice rounds. Getting the energy to go to the body part she wanted was like having to shovel snow. Once you got it off the ground you could move around as you liked, but try and go somewhere new and you had a lot of digging to do.

  Morgan had gotten her arms pretty used to the transfer and was now working on her legs, though she still felt like she was losing a lot of energy in the transfer, not to mention the release. She’d pulled up two more targets and set them beside the primary before and had picked up just a hint of concussive spillover on them, meaning her attacks weren’t point precise, hence the concussive ‘wave’ moniker. She thought she could trim it down more with practice, but how far was something she’d have to figure out in the long run. Training took time, and with this being a brand new ability she was going to be a newb for some time to come, like it or not.

  After several more rounds of kick-launched waves Morgan went back to eating more wafers and more stretching/agility runs while she waited to recharge. It didn’t seem to matter what she did in the meantime so long as she didn’t pull on the buffer’s energy.

  After several repetitions of this practice/recharge cycle Morgan came back from a 2 mile run on the track and decided to try something she’d first attempted yesterday with partial success, but it was a power hog so she hadn’t tried a second time.

  At least partially full of energy, she stepped away from her satchel and pulled her shoes and socks off again, leaving them in a neat pile on the floor on top of which she added her clothes. She ran a short length past the target to get into the clear portion of the Lane, having as much room around her as possible, then she stood still in the center between the two walls and raised her head up, half staring at the ceiling while she spread her arms and legs slightly wide and flexed every muscle in her body, trying to maintain a hold on her self-control.

  Feeling the energy just below the surface she tapped into it, drawing forth as small a set of tingles as she could and feeling it manifest along her spine again…except she kept pulling on it, causing more tingles to come forth in a gentle cascade. She tried to spread it out through her entire body, but only managed her left arm at first. With some coaxing she got it going down her right as well, then she added her legs and finally her neck up into her head and she could feel her hair begin to lift up and tug on her ponytail.

  Morgan reached up and pulled her hair tie out and tossed it aside, then closed her eyes and focused on smoothing out the energy flow as it gently dispersed from various points on her body. She held the effort for nearly 20 seconds before upping the flow, feeling new body parts begin to discharge that hadn’t before. She kept patiently pushing it out, focusing on new areas of her body with her mind until they became saturated in energy and began to discharge, creating a gentle wind flowing out from her naked body in all directions.

  The trailblazer could feel the ‘snow’ melting away and kept the energy flowing steadily as long as she could, feeling sparkly inside as the tingles began manifesting not only along her spine but a few other points in her body as well. She hoped it would escalate further, but Morgan started to feel her buffer running out of energy so she decided to go for a finishing move.

  Pushing as much of a surge of tingles as she could get, she yelled and let loose a much more violent stream of energy flowing out from her body in all directions over the course of 1.5 seconds…then she dropped to a knee and her straight hair fell back down over her shoulders as she blew out an excited and relieved breath, feeling herself once again out of energy.

  She reached up and pulled some of the now frizzy strands out in front of her face so she could see the hair, ironically wondering if it had gone blonde, for she could have sworn she’d been close to going super saiyan.

  Still taking a knee and in no hurry to move, Morgan glanced down at her naked body. It looked normal, but on the inside it felt like she was absolutely glowing.

  “Now I just have to figure out how to do that with clothes on,” she said, adding that to her mental list of future training priorities, along with several other potential applications of the concussive energy that she was eager to begin experimenting with.

  Morgan stood up and walked back over to her satchel, pulling out a couple of wafers to chew on while she got dressed and hoping that drills like that would help her increase the size of her buffer considerably, because as it was she didn’t have even a shred of the energy reserves necessary for some of the crazy training ideas she was coming up with.

  iTunes: "Stamp on the Ground"

  Insurrection

  1

  May 3, 2405

  Solar System

  Ganymede

  A foot landed in his back, knocking him forward into two other adepts but taking it had been necessary to get his hand around the right one’s wrist. As David-441 was moved forward he jerked to the right, landing his shoulder into the Time Lord’s dark blue uniform just above the navel and knocking him back…only to twist aside to duck another adept’s punch at his head. As David dropped he yanked the other one back in by the wrist he still held, off-balancing him enough that when the level 77 acolyte popped back up to full standing height he was able to kick the adept in the midsection and knock him back to the edge of the elevated ring.

  The Time Lord almost caught his balance, but came up a few inches short, falling backwards and landing on a 45 degree padded incline a few meters down that slid him away from the ‘king of the hill’ open air ring and out of the enhanced gravity, depositing him on the flat floor some distance away where more adepts from Clan Time Lord were picking themselves up and walking off to the exits as more and more of their trial team continued to get knocked off above in spurts.

  David kept on the move, knowing that staying put was to the Time Lords’ advantage. He had a 25 meter diameter circle to work around in 1.2 gravity, with six short walkways feeding him 1,000 adepts at a staggered rate of their choosing. Their goal in this Archon trial was simple…knock him off in hand to hand combat. They could come at him one at a time or rush as many as they could onto the platform. This lot was pumping numbers at him, but they weren’t being reckless about it. David was having to stay on the move constantly, because they weren’t giving him so much as a second’s break…which he knew was intentional. They were trying to wear him down to the point where he’d make a mistake.

  Which was the challenge for him. This trial was one of hundreds taking place across the star system which saw the Clans battling each other with their lower ranking Archons, adepts mostly. There were still prizes to be claimed, both material and territorial for the Clans, but the trials had mostly reverted back to what they were originally intended to be…combat experience, Archon vs. Archon, to keep them sharp and uncomfortable to where they’d have to push their limits and improve, else they’d be very uncomfortable.

  As these adepts now were. Most of the time they thought of themselves as being the best of the best, and compared with the rest of the star system they were, but with all the higher level Archons off on assignments outside of Sol David felt it necessary to come down and remind them how far they had to go to catch the others
, let alone the trailblazers. This trial was important for them to get their asses kicked so they could learn from it, as well as to learn how to counter a superior opponent using numbers.

  David’s challenge was the reverse, learning how to cope with numerical disadvantage despite being superior to his challengers. This wasn’t the first time he’d worked this end of this trial, nor was he the only one doing so. Other Clans were making runs against a few higher ranking Archons in the Star Force training facility on Ganymede, along with similar trials for a number of Knights and Regulars that David was also assisting with on occasion in between his own training sessions…getting to play ‘black knight’ despite the fact that he only wore his white with silver stripe Archon uniform.

  By the ones and twos he continued to knock the Time Lords out of the gravity enhanced ring, moving about from side to side but never getting within 2 meters of the edge. The gravity was slowing their movements considerably, but less so David who normally did extensive gravity training at 1.5g, so to him this felt easy…especially when everyone else seemed to be in slow motion.

  Still, this Time Lord bunch had come prepared. He guessed they’d watched previous trials footage when other Clans had gone up against him, each of which had failed, and had tailored their strategy accordingly. He was faster and stronger than any of them by a long shot, then add in their gravity disadvantage and they were hopelessly outmatched one on one, but they had six access ways onto the platform and they were using all of them to funnel adepts in, many of which stood waiting and watching until there was enough room on the platform to get into the fight.

  Though he didn’t have time to analyze their tactics, David noted that they were staggering their attacks to keep the pressure on him constantly, but without cluttering up the platform and allowing him to shove/kick them off four or five at a time…which was smart. It also lengthened the time of conflict, stretching out the 1000 man army he had facing him into one very long fight.

  To top it off they weren’t fighting him trying to knock him off, but rather to stand their ground. Another interesting tactic, in that each of them were trying, he thought, to get in as many blows/blocks as they could, thus wearing him down further. David wondered if they were holding back their strongest adepts for the end when he would be the weakest, but there was little time for him to do anything other than punch, kick, flip, twist, and evade until he set one of them up for a knockout bounce. If he wanted to analyze their attack pattern in detail, he’d have to do it post trial.

  David was making good time, but each Clan that came against him was getting better…which was the point. This was one of the newer trials, and not widely used because of the availability of high enough level Archons to play king of the hill with. Gone were the egotistical ‘I’m gonna knock him out’ attacks that he’d gloriously punted off the platform in previous days, now replaced with pure team tactics. These adepts had to work together to stand a chance of taking him down, and he was pleased to see they were finally starting to think and fight like Archons rather than newbs.

  David palm-punched an adept with a cross from right to left, knocking her up off her feet because of the shallow rising angle he put on the blow and threw the adept back into another, then dropped into a heavy spin kick and knocked the legs out from two more as they swung at where his head had just been. One of them fell into him, but a knee lifted the adept up and nearly all the way off the platform where the Time Lord fell on his back, his head dangling over the side.

  He felt his chest, wondering if something hadn’t been broken as more of his Clan members were tossed aside with horrifying ease. He was a level 11 adept, far stronger and faster than any normal Human, and yet he’d been flicked aside by a man an inch shorter than him and one who looked to be 20 pounds lighter…and made of adamantium.

  The adept swung himself around so he could get his legs underneath him from behind while keeping his torso low and his eyes on the acolyte. Another Time Lord got knocked back his way and the adept ducked down…with the other flipping over top of him like a pivot point. Had he not ducked he would have gone over the side as well, which is probably what the Archon had intended.

  Pleased that he’d succeeded in defying him that much, the adept got his feet under him and charged, sliding in across the floor and reaching for David’s legs…only to get kicked in the face, hard. He felt his nose pop as he was twisted to the side by the blow, then all of a sudden David was knocked back his way by a pair of others with interlocked arms and forming a Human battering wall. The acolyte countered them, but an almost random kick by the adept caught him between the legs and tripped him up, dumping the acolyte down on top of the adept with other Time Lords falling onto the pile.

  David knew he’d been caught off guard and had made a tactical mistake of letting one of them drop near his feet…but he’d wanted to teach the newb a lesson that would sting for a while. Coming in at his feet was stupid, and David wasn’t going to cut them some slack because this was a training exercise. He might be holding back on the others to conserve energy, but he wasn’t going to let one of the imps wander into dangerous territory like that…otherwise it might encourage them to do the same in the future, and had he been a Calavari or other physically strong opponent they’d stomp the newbs flat without hesitation.

  His lesson had cost him though, and now David was squeezed between a sandwich of Time Lords, and if they had any sense they’d…

  Just as he got his head up the other adepts began rushing onto the platform and pushing the pile towards the edge with the downed adepts clinging onto David so he couldn’t get up or fight back, intending to go over with him in order to get their Clan the victory.

  Problem was, despite having a bunch of kids clinging to his arms and legs, David definitely could still fight back.

  Knowing that he had to go all-in David started flexing back and forth, getting himself inches of airspace to work with and started delivering elbows and kicks into the bodies surrounding him…gapping them and creating more room to work with, all within split seconds before they’d come crashing back down on him or more would stack on the pile…which then made it even harder to push towards the edge.

  David kicked his right leg free, then knocked the leg out from under an adept on the outside of the pile. She fell down, taken off guard, and he kicked her in the chest as she dropped, sending her tumbling back into the legs of three others and mowing them down like bowling pins from the ferocity of the blow.

  Then another adept got knocked off the stack…and another. Two more went toppling over the edge as the pile neared it before David’s head finally came into view just in time to headbutt another newb Archon in the chest and knock him off. Twisting left and right David finally got mostly free, then punched three more in sequence off of him, one going over the side and two more headed back towards center, falling into the others coming forward.

  They caught them and shoved them back, using their fellow Time Lords like ammunition to keep David down or knock him off the side, but the acolyte had just enough time to snap his legs back underneath him and drop down to his knees in a turtle shell as they fell on top of him…then a moment later they all came rising up in a mass as David heaved them off him in Neo-esk fashion. A series of lightning-fast blows knocked the mass of blue uniformed adepts aside, hollowing out a small clear space that David expanded upon as soon as he had enough room to swing his legs, after which the more than three dozen Time Lords that had come out onto the platform began falling off it in droves, given that they had no room to duck or dodge the acolyte’s blows.

  David eventually worked his way back to the center and cleaned off the deck, with the Time Lord reinforcements falling back into their staggered attacks, hoping again to wear him down with their numbers but they would have no success. His ire was up now and he kept his effort level up straight through to completion, reveling in the increased challenge they were finally giving him and knowing that it would make both them and him better…though mostly
him, given that the average time on the ‘hill’ for the adepts was between 10 and 15 seconds.

  David grappled with the last of them, slipping an arm underneath the adept’s armpit and twisting her around, then he grabbed her leg and lifted her up off her feet and walked to the edge.

  “Off you go,” he said casually, tossing her down to the angled crash mats and watching her slide down to the bottom where the others were still picking themselves up and walking out.

  David rubbed his hands as if brushing off dirt then slowly walked back to the center and gave the control room a two-fingered salute before heading over one of the six walkways and exiting the way the adepts had been coming in from a large gathering area circling the ring whose overhang extended out above the majority of the crash pads. With the room now all to himself the acolyte walked across with almost inaudible footsteps and exited out a side door to one of the main hallways that connected the various trials’ competition zones that were separate from the training areas.

  As he walked down to the left his vision got a little wonky on him and he blinked several times trying to clear it, only to have it extend out behind him where he could ‘see’ a person running up towards him.

  The enhanced sense faded almost as soon as it had begun and David turned around to meet the adept chasing after him.

  “Acolyte,” the man said, appearing to be the same age as David…though all Archons looked to be roughly 25, despite the fact that David was 380 and this adept was probably 40-100. “Can you spare 30 seconds?”

  “Half a minute, yes,” he offered, waiting for a question.