by Aer-ki Jyr
“Wish we’d known about that,” Emily said, mildly annoyed even though their Final Challenge had been more than two years ago.
“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Megan commented as the trainees recovered the last of their wounded while keeping Vermaire at bay with a hail of stingers completely coating his armor in green paint. “We didn’t have enough ammunition to do that.”
“Point,” Emily conceded.
“There’s also a field deactivation mechanism,” Wilson added, almost offhandedly. “They didn’t find it either, but there’s one turret in each area with a slightly different firing rhythm. If you can take it out before any of the adjacent two rings, it will deactivate the entire field…but if you take it out in sequence like they did it does nothing. Ditto for taking it apart.”
“Any other little tricks we missed?” Emily asked.
“A few,” Wilson said as the last of the trainees made it over the wall and past the finish line, with the main doors in front of the head trainer and two adepts cracking open, revealing the 100 new graduates, many of which were still unconscious.
“They ran out of serum,” Megan noted as the unconscious ones were being carried forward.
Wilson pulled a packet out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I thought they might. They’ve developed a bad habit of taking hits to draw fire instead of dodging. It works for the challenges, so they kept doing it despite the point penalties. Something you’ll have to break them of,” he said as the first few began wandering out of the long connective hallway.
“Among other things,” she said, walking a few steps forward and getting their attention with a wave of her hand. She tossed the packet to the closest one who, to his credit, snatched it out of the air with ease.
“Thanks,” he said, turning back and looking for those still unconscious.
As the others began filing out and gathering around Wilson, Emily began wrinkling her nose. “Whoa, you guys stink!”
“Yes they do,” Megan agreed, waving a hand in front of her face. “Did you guys forget how to shower?”
“We’ve been in there for days,” one of the girls argued. “What do you expect?”
“Wilson, I think you need to add some showers for the slow pokes,” Megan said deadpan. “This is bad.”
“Slow pokes?” another one of them asked irreverently.
Wilson raised a hand to get everyone’s attention. “Congratulations on passing the Final Challenge. Your basic training is now over. Allow me to introduce 023 and 026, they will be your handlers and superiors during your transition to adept training, which they will explain. My job here is done, and I bid you all good luck…trust me when I say that you’re going to need it.”
“What did he mean by that?” one of them asked as he walked off.
“It means the kid gloves are coming off,” Emily said, looking them over. “And things get much more difficult from here on out.”
“It also means you answer to us,” Megan added. “And we have no time for slackers.”
“We’ve gone through everything you did,” one of them complained. “How can we be slackers?”
Emily walked up to him, then though better of it when she caught a whiff of the surrounding air. “That was the easy part. Adept training is a whole new game, and I’m not convinced you’ll be up to it. It took you three days to get through the Final Challenge. It took us less than one.”
The trainees exchanged glances, but said nothing further.
“You did well getting this far, but you’re on our watch now,” Megan offered. “If we’re going to train and work together, you’ve got a lot to learn and little time to do it in, so keep an open mind and listen closely, because we’re not going to hold your hands past orientation. We’ve got a busy schedule of our own, and if you can’t find your own motivation we’re not going to waste our time with you.”
“Right now though,” Emily continued, “there’s a lot we’ve got to fill you in on…but first you’re hitting the showers, because you really do reek.”
She just stared at them for a moment when none of them moved. “I mean it, go!” she said, pointing down the hallway and the long walk back to the equipment room. “Get cleaned up, then we’ll talk.”
As a group they began walking, slowly, in a haze that was part fatigue, part confusion. Emily and Megan let them get well ahead of them, dragging their stench down the hall with them.
“Well?” Megan whispered.
“I don’t know,” Emily said, watching them walk away. “They look like us, but they don’t feel the same.”
“Think that’s because of the ambrosia, or because they suck?”
“Ask me again when they’re not offending my nose,” she said, smirking. “That is really bad.”
“Yeah it is,” Megan agreed as they started to follow them from a distance. “But if they made it through, they’ve got to have some skills.”
“I know, but if they get stubborn or cocky we’re going to have to beat them into compliance.”
“Easy enough,” Megan pointed out. “Save for the fact that we don’t want automatons, we want improvisers. If they can’t learn to train themselves we’ll have to cut them loose.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Emily agreed, thinking along similar lines. “Let’s see how many of them we can salvage. We’re going to need their help down the road.”
“That we will…” Megan agreed, looking at their ‘peers’ walking ahead of them. Their gait was lithe and strong, similar to their own but smaller somehow, weaker. It was only then that she realized how much the ambrosia training had changed them, both physically and mentally. They’d spent so much time in their own company that they hadn’t recognized their transition from skilled to superhuman, but looking at the second class now as if they were a mirror of themselves a few years ago, the change finally hit home.
The question was, could these trainees make the same transition? Megan wasn’t sure they could, but she also wasn’t going to count them out either after all they’d gone through at the hands of the trainers. That at least was something they had in common.
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