Chase cursed his inability to remember faces.

One of the world’s most famous Ultras shows up on his doorstep and what does he do? He asks who the hell she is, of course.

“Oh fuck,” he stuttered. “I mean, sorry about that…uhhh…”

“May we come in?” Nebula asked.

“Yes, yes, please do. Down that hall and to the right — I wouldn’t advise looking into the living room unless you want to go blind.”

Lucia Sanabria — the Lucia Sanabria — gave him a strange look as she brushed past and entered the house. She nodded politely at the décor, then disappeared down the hall. Nebula hung back.

“Just so you know, I don’t want to be here and I think Sanabria is half-mad to think you’d be a good candidate.”

Chase frowned. “Point taken, though I have no idea what you’re talking about. Candidate for what?”

“Just follow me, sit tight, and speak when spoken to, okay?”

Nebula disappeared through the hall as if it were her own house and she was reluctantly letting Chase inside. He took a moment to gather himself, then followed.

So much for a ‘retreat’, he thought. It felt like he had a sign on his back saying ‘Make My Life Difficult, Please.’ At least he was getting facetime with one of the biggest names in the business.

He followed his guests into the kitchen, where Nebula had chosen a stool and Sanabria was rifling through the fridge. She pulled out a jar of pickles, cracked the lid, and pulled one out.

“Those were here before us,” Chase commented. “Not sure if you should eat…okay never mind.” Sanabria had chewed through three or four before he’d even finished his sentence. Perhaps Ultras were immune to food-poisoning amongst their other absurd powers.

“You’re not an S-Rank, are you?” Sanabria asked through a mouthful of green mush. “I’m not getting anything from you, to be honest. Is that just one of your abilities? Veiling your power?”

Nebula swivelled on her stool, looking bored. “I already told you, he’s Talentless. Thinks he’s a big shot A-Rank cause of those guns he totes around.”

“Uh-huh.” Sanabria looked up to the roof and whispered something too quietly for Chase to hear. She took another peek into the fridge, chewed her lip at the sight of a block of chocolate, then shut the door.

“Better not.” She slammed her palms on the marble bench, causing the walls to rumble. “So what the hell’s so special about you? Why’d he pick you out?”

Chase stood slack jawed. It was like he’d walked into a classroom halfway through a lecture and immediately been given a pop quiz. He had so many questions, but the looks Nebula and Sanabria gave him suggested he had to choose wisely. They appeared as exasperated at him as he was at the injustice of it all.

He was supposed to be out on the pool, floating around on a giant rubber duck with a drink in his hand and sunglasses over his closed eyes.

“Look, I feel like I need to say this: I have no idea why you’re here or what you want from me. Who’s picking me? What am I a candidate for? Pardon my rudeness, but don’t you two have better things to be doing? An Ultra Hunter and an S-Rank? Couldn’t this person just send a couple GRA officials or something?”

Sanabria snorted back a laugh. “GRA officials? Those knobheads? Pff, I have enough trouble with my own government — I don’t come to New Melbourne just to deal with yours.”

He nodded but stayed silent. She’d answered the least important of his questions, and it was a nothing-answer at that.

“And regarding your selection, that’s not for you to know. It’s not even for me to know, to be honest. I may be the gun, but I am far from the hand that fires it. Or the brain that tells the hand to move.”

That just made him more confused, but at least he could live in the safety of knowing that the whole thing was above his paygrade. Is this case, at this specific time, ignorance was bliss.

“Okay, well, I’d like to know what exactly you want from me. So far, this whole situation feels like it could be either a job interview or an execution.”

His hand instinctively drifted to where his Beretta would normally sit. Not because he wanted to draw it — he wasn’t an idiot — but just because its familiar weight gave him comfort. As promised, his guns had shown up at his and Gramps’ place in a series of tightly wrapped, smaller and smaller boxes, like Matryoshka dolls. In the final package lay his weapons, swaddled in bubble wrap. But he hadn’t brought them on vacation — without his weapons nearby or his hoodie around to increase his stats, he was as vanilla as any other citizen.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He felt naked.

Nebula hopped from her seat and produced a small clump of crystal from her palm, shaping it idly as she spoke. “Sanabria and her…friends…have been told to expand their ranks, and apparently we both exalted ourselves enough in the Two City Break to catch the eye of someone important. Don’t ask me how you were included in the same boat as me, but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt. But is the kicker is…” she looked across to Sanabria, who stepped forward and held out her hands as if she were going to strangle Chase.

Instead, she rested her hands on his shoulders. This close, he could smell her perfume like freshly cut grass, and see how her eyes seemed to drill right through him.

“But…you are both unworthy in your current states. My task is to take you two and mould you into something better. Like a potter taking a lump of clay and creating a vase.”

Nebula looked mildly offended by the comparison. “I’ll admit I don’t understand why you don’t just ditch him and focus your efforts on me. That would be far easier, right?”

Sanabria gave a rare smile. “I might just do so. To me, neither of you are ready to be moulded. You are not clay; you are buckets full of mud and silt that need to be washed and refined until you are ready to be worked. To be moulded.”

Chase couldn’t help but smile as Nebula’s face drooped. Seeing himself placed on the same pedestal as her — despite being told he was comparable to a lump of wet dirt — was oddly satisfying. It was also terrifying. If the distance between them was condensed to nothing despite their power being so disparate, how powerful were the people who were making these decisions? How powerful was Sanabria, to just stand here and lay down the law without a care in the world?

He suddenly wished they’d taken this meeting outside. Nebula looked royally pissed off, and a single attack from her might level the whole house. That’d be tough to explain to the property manager.

Sanabria clapped. “Anyway, now that I’ve given you both such lovely news, I’ll leave you to get to know one another! There’s nothing like the fires of competition to forge a friendship in, correct?”

With that, she strolled out a sliding door into the garden and leapt straight up, instantly out of sight. She never came down, at least not within the bounds of his vision.

It took him a moment to realise that Nebula was still there, glaring at him.

“So,” he started, “should we discuss our plans? Maybe do some brainstorming? If we work together, maybe that’ll increase our chances of—”

“No.” Pink fire blazed in her eyes as she stared into him, and the floating piece of crystal in her hands had melted into the form of a knife. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to become so much stronger that they have no choice but to make me an Ultra-Hunter. Meanwhile, you’re going to watch as I stretch farther and farther away from you, until the distance between us is so great that you may as well never have tried running. That’s what’s going to happen.”

“I see.” He was trying to be polite, but her brashness was beginning to get on his nerves. Who was she to talk down to him? Sure, she could beat him in a fight, but that didn’t give her the right to be so rude to someone she barely knew. “Well I appreciate your candidness and I’ll do my best to keep up. Who knows, maybe I’ll surprise you.”

Nebula raised one eyebrow into a harsh arc. Without another word, she left the house the way she came. He thought she might’ve dashed away on crystal platforms like she had during the Break, but he supposed it wasn’t good for her reputation to be dropping razor-sharp shards of crystal around the City.

Once she left, Chase grabbed a beer and sat on the couch in front of the television, not bothering to turn it on. His mind was full of ideas; plans formulating and dissolving as he grasped at any method to match Nebula’s proposed course of action. He was limited by the actions and abilities of others — without Herb he couldn’t keep up his supply of ammo, without Jenny he couldn’t run the Guild, without Darryl (and perhaps The Market) he couldn’t increase his firepower. Hell, he even relied on the Haulers to dice up monsters, and the masses to purchase them and keep the cash flowing. He was utterly dependent on such a large web of people, yet Hunters like Nebula and Jamie could advance along their paths with nothing more than their own two hands and the grit to keep going.

He had to find a way to turn his dependencies into strengths. To make him stand out as a force to be reckoned with.

As he turned over his various problems, he was beginning to see them in a new light.

“Chase? Who was that?”

Kim, Robin and Jamie (now fully clothed, thankfully) had appeared in the room while he was deep in thought.

“Why is the shape of a hand imprinted into this bench?” Jamie asked. There was a yelp as he thumped his palm into it and discovered that it was wasn’t malleable for him, too.

“Nebula and Ms Sanabria just dropped by,” Chase said.

The room went so quiet he could’ve heard a fly rubbing its hands together.

“Dropped by?” Jamie suddenly cried. “What do you mean they dropped by?” He yanked his hand from the imprint as if it were radioactive.

“They wanted to talk to me, and I couldn’t exactly say no. Also, those pickles in the fridge are fine, if y’all are interested. Sanabria had a few, and she didn’t kick the bucket.”

Kim sat down in an armchair, rotating it to face him rather than the television. “Stop pretending to be so cool about it. You’re freaking out right now, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. I think I peed a little when Sanabria put her hands on me.”

Kim’s eyes narrowed. “What did she do?”

“It was an intimidation thing, I think. Put her palms on my shoulders as if she was going to clap my head into smithereens if I said the wrong thing.”

Jamie came over, shaking his head. He was pinching his arm as if testing whether he was dreaming. “Bro, you gotta tell us what went down from the start.”

So Chase did just that, and the other Ballistic members slowly gathered, gravitating toward the gossip. When he mentioned Nebula’s semi-meltdown, Mia laughed. When he finished his summary, the room was quiet for a long time.

“So what’s the plan?” Jenny asked. She’d crept in as he was recounting Sanabria’s method of leaving the house, and she spoke in a whisper.

Chase drummed his hands on the couch, trying to formulate his growing to-do list into an actionable plan. It felt wrong to be discussing work in the middle of their retreat, but the room was abuzz. Discussing Ballistic’s future was a lot more exciting than sunbathing by the pool or lounging in a home cinema.

He looked at Jenny, but he was addressing the entire group.

“It’s like you said.” He paused for the simple sake of gravitas.

“We expand.”