Desolated Tomas, stayed on the ground coughing and spitting all the dirt that was stuffed in his mouth and nostrils. Never before he had been humiliated this hard, completely destroyed without having a single chance to fight back.

With the same mocking smile on his face since the beginning of the final fight, Duke knew his little tournament had achieved its purpose. There was not a single first year bragging about his powers anymore much less feeling invincible. In a single day he had broken their sense of superiority and installed a sense of urgency to get strong in each one of them.

Then, Duke got down to the arena to help the little heir stand up to go to check with the healing lady. By the time he got right beside the struggling kid, he looked down to him and put some salt in his wound, “I remember telling you to not get beaten so hard but at least now you learned what happens when you underestimate your opponents”

Tomas was about to complain but stopped. In the end the professor was right; he had completely underestimated her. He was aware of her power to play with light, but exactly because of that he thought her power was harmless. He only ever saw her display a kind of light show when their group was hanging around and he could never imagine its powerful output.

Never in his wildest dreams he considered her capable of using light to attack, much less to be capable of subduing him in close combat. As friends, they had trained together multiple times without using powers for obvious reasons, and every single time, he had won. Some times were easier, others were close but the result never changed, that was until she could take his vision out.

The moment he went blind the stacks turned against him. He became only capable of responding to her moves, and very lousy at that.

Just like a very intricate Robot AI, the moment one of its main sources of information is taken out, its predictions become incomplete and its movements become defective or simply wrong. In the human body, the role of the biggest information source is played by the eyes. It’s the fundamental sensor through which we perceive the world and, without it, our range of information inputs gets reduced to a tiny fraction of what it was before, making our actions and rationing defective, especially in a fight.

Seeing her friend getting up with the teacher’s help, Cindy, despite being a bit cold towards everyone, felt like she should say something to cheer up her friend a bit. “Pease, don’t get mad at me for saying this, but you two simply couldn’t win. I might be just one year older than you but that’s different if you think about the time we have our powers”

Then she concluded her point, “I’ve been training my light absorption and release for one entire year by now, and you have what? Trained for two days?”

‘She really has a point’, Tomas thought. One entire year training a single thing was bound to make a difference. Tomas couldn’t have done much in that fight even if he could train his skin for one more year, but if his partner was a bit more useful things could be different.

Breaking his moment of reflection, Duke told him a secret of this training that only the champions were allowed to know. “Don’t get too sad kiddo, it’s a tradition to make a second year to beat both the first years finalist to make you feel weak. Is there a better motivation to make you train? kukukuku”

And then he added a bit of shame on Cindy, ”You see, your friend Cindy here might seem invincible right now, but can you guess what place she scored in her first year competition?” Still a bit in shock of his friend's demonstration of power, he answered with cautious “She wasn't first?”

“She was the last kiddo. By the time she received her powers, she could only glow like a firefly and make her surroundings go darker. I remember like yesterday some old teachers commenting about that pitiful fight where a kid who could stretch his arms…”

“ENOUGH TEACHER DUKE! Don’t talk about that day ever again!” Cindy couldn't stand listening about the most humiliating day of her life ever again.

Satisfied to have messed with Cindy’s cold and superior facade, Duke stopped, “Alright, I will leave this story for another day. Now, lets go check with lady Sarah to see if you have breathed in some dirt”

Then, Duke looked up to the crowd, still around the arena, and made his final speech for the new kids in the class. “You have watched your little show, kids. May it serve as a motivation for you all, to improve your selfs and your dreams. There will always be someone stronger out there, but train hard to be that stronger guy most of the time.”

It was visible, both the fear and motivation in the children's eyes. Seeing that his goal was accomplished, Duke quickly spoke to the auxiliary teachers, “Match the kids and put them to spar like usual, use the tournament positions as a reference to pair them. Say a couple words about where they can improve based on their fights and their dreams and let them be.”

That was the usual way the combat dreamers class in the mixers Clan worked. Fight, fight and fight. Train your skills and your dream against an infinite number of different people with an infinite number of different dreams. Get used to every match up, get used to your own dream and, finally, develop your own unique fighting style.

This training that may seem simple was one of the biggest powers of the mixers Clan, right along with their unpredictability. They became experts in fighting against almost every kind of power that existed. Each one of them had a different strategy tailored to face every dream they had ever seen before, and were more adaptable than any other Clan when facing an unknown dream. Of course it was all thanks to the Clan core characteristic, there was power in diversity.

To put in simpler words, you could fight boxing or judo all your life only facing right handed guys, and be very good at it. But all it takes to break your stance is a left handed one. In the case of the mixers Clan, they always trained against left and right handed guys, they trained against different kinds of martial arts also, they trained even in different kinds of sports. And, therefore, their flexibility.

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They could fight against anyone and almost no one was prepared to fight them.

After Duke left with Tomas, the class returned to its normal activities. Lucien, along with his friends and the other kids, started warming up while the auxiliary teachers split the group in pairs to spar.

“What are you doing here Lucien? Aren’t you at the support class?” Asked Jess right after they started running. “Hell no! You should have seen their training, I would never learn how to fight there.”

Not knowing how to answer Jess just let it be, but Michel didn’t. “And why would you learn how to fight? You would be deadweight in a battle or on a hunt without combat dreams either way…”

Lucien, driven by rage, was about to challenge Michel to a spar right there, but his rational side spoke louder, and he just defended his stance. “Just you wait, I’m sure my next dream will be a combat one and then I will be plenty useful. It doesn’t even need to be that powerful, just enough to let me be able to fight”

Michel was about to poke him even further, but was stopped by Jess changing topics “So how will you train if you don’t know what kind of dream you will get?”

As Lucien still hadn’t figured that out, he answered with a bit of uncertainty, “I guess I will train the basics of close combat and run a bit more?”

Jess broke into a laugh. “So you will keep practicing just like before we received our powers? Well, it seems you have no other way really…”

“Laugh all you want, let's see who will get to choose the bird first at our graduation ceremony” Luciens responded a bit mad by her laugh.

“Let’s see if you can even choose a bird,” Jess taunted.

At the end of their warm up, all the kids had a pair but Lucien. That’s simply because he didn’t participate in the tournament and, therefore, didn’t have a rank. “Come here Lucien, let us rank you” a teacher called.

Lucien quickly got in front of the teacher as fast as he could. “I’m here, teacher,” he announced. In a few minutes he could be seen facing a random kid with a very weak dream, that allowed him to scream louder. At this point, it wasn’t enough to stun anyone, it was only annoying so he was basically a normal kid too.

As expected Lucien beated the kid senseless in seconds, after all, he had always been the best fighter before the bestowment despite not being the strongest. As the minutes passed, Lucien faced kids with gradually stronger dreams using all of his cunning side to come out on top of his fights.

Until it wasn’t enough.

“I give up!” Lucien screamed. That was his limit. He had beaten a few weak kids but that was it. The moment the dreams grew more powerful and his opponents a bit less dumb, he started to struggle to even have a chance to fight. In the end, he was still in one of the last positions in the rank and with time it would get worse.

“Okay, now that we have your rank, you can enter the spar rotation against people of your level” said the teacher.

Lucien was dead tired. He had fought nonstop against several kids and they wanted him to start training now? But obediently he mustered all the strength he had and walked to the teacher. He didn’t want to show weakness, he wanted everyone to know that this was his rightful place.

But some kids disagreed. Support kids belong to the support class. That simple line of reasoning generated a prejudice in most of the kids from the combat class, even more so in the ones beaten by Lucien and put behind him in the ranking.

Lucien was paired against a random kid he didn’t know the name and didn’t care to know, he was too tired for that. But looking at the boy’s eyes, he knew something would be different in this fight, he could feel it.

Cautiously, he adopted his fighting stance just like his father taught him and started going in his opponent’s direction. The other kid put up a lousy fighting stance that could barely be called one, and Lucien instantly registered he was a melee fighter, no ranged dreamer would need to put up a fighting stance.

Lucien used some faints trying to bait the kid without committing too much, to make him reveal his dream, but nothing happened. ‘Am I overthinking this?’ thought Lucien. And then he started being more aggressive in his attacks. He was too tired to keep testing the water and decided to go all out to end it quickly, which proved to be a mistake.

When his punch finally got through his opponent’s guard and was about to hit a sweet spot on the side of the other kid’s chin, a spike similar to a porcupine surged on the way. The thin spike penetrated effortlessly into Lucien’s hand, provoking unimaginable pain and damage on the way.

Lucien fell to the floor screaming and holding his perforated hand, and when he was about to voice his forfeit, a punch came, leaving another spike on his cheek. After that, a series of spiky pouches drilled holes all over Lucien’s body, making him look like a reverse porcupine. All the pain and the accumulated tiredness made him forget for a few seconds he could give up by tapping the floor, and it cost him a lot.

With his body full of holes and spikes, he was carried by a teacher to the healing Lady. Amidst all the pain he was suffering, a single image got registered in his mind - The random kid's sadistic grin while filling his body with holes.

What Lucien didn’t know was that this kid was taking revenge for his friend that had fallen a position in the ranking because of Lucien. Very childish reasoning, but a very heavy punishment. This was proof that this world was not made for weaklings. He also didn’t know that this was only the beginning of a few very painful years since the weaker kids would still be below him in rank and he had no plans to give up.

###

Getting out of aunty’s Sarah’s house, Lucien, fully patched up, found himself facing a familiar small girl with a very angry face. “You idiot! Why didn’t you tell me you were changing classes? I’ve been running all day from that teacher all alone!” Said Mary very annoyed.

Lucien knew she was right. In her place he would be very angry with him, but surprisingly she quickly changed the topic. “Did you face an armored leopard or something, Luci?” She joked with a bit of concern for his situation.

“Worse, I fought a guy with a dream to use some spikes from his skin” and he added, “And he seemed to not like me very much for some reason…”

Mary tried to see the positive side of things “Forget it, since you fought him today, you will only face him again in a few weeks later”

“So, what are you doing here?” Asked Luci back.

As expected, Mary answered exactly what he thought had happened. “This time I couldn't outrun the teacher, and he seemed to have some grudge left from yesterday. At least I could use my power on myself to make the stick slide on my skin and hurt less…”

“Wow, your power is way more useful than I thought” Luci complimented.

‘I just hope the next day will be better’ Lucien tried to think positively, just like Mary. Without knowing what the future had prepared for him.