Max sat uneasily next to Damian among a throng of first-year students in the cavernous expanse of Prometheus Academy’s Grand Hall. He had never seen a medieval castle before, but this was what he imagined the inside of one must look like. Oddly enough, rural Rebel County, Mississippi didn’t sport a single castle, and was known more for its cattle than its castles.
Vaulted stone ceilings arched skyward, immense hearths on either side of the rectangular hall blazed with fires, and rich tapestries embroidered with huge emblems hung from the stone walls. Stout wooden tables, long and numerous enough to seat an army, stretched across the room. Flickering torches cast rippling pools of light and shadow, creating an atmosphere of mysterious grandeur.
Yet this was no conventional castle hall. Mixed with the medieval architecture were futuristic elements Max had previously seen only in science fiction movies. Glossy black panels undulating like disturbed oil slicks dotted sections of the rough-hewn stone walls. Spherical drones, acting as mobile spotlights, hovered among intricate chandeliers, casting their beams on various areas of the room. Armed servitors stood along the walls; they were so still that, if Max hadn’t known better, he might have thought they were statues. And though Max saw no evidence of ventilation systems, sophisticated ones must have been in place; there wasn’t even a whiff of smoke from the hearths and torches.
But dominating all was the fist.
In the center of the hall was a sculpture unlike anything Max had ever seen. A massive metal arm rippling with muscle and sinew stretched from the floor, at least twenty feet high. The arm shimmered in the hall’s many lights, making the inert sculpture look like it was made of flowing quicksilver. The sculpture’s stone plinth was cleverly fashioned to look like rubble, as if a giant robot under the castle had rammed its hand through the floor of the Grand Hall. The arm’s fist was clenched tightly around a meticulously rendered replica of Earth, its continents and oceans depicted in striking detail.
The implications of that fist clenching the Earth as if to crush it were impossible to ignore. It hardened Max’s resolve to escape this den of iniquity as soon as possible. If this place wanted to train Max to be some sort of latter-day Genghis Khan, he wanted no parts of it. He wanted to be a superhero, not a super-conqueror. Being a Hero was dangerous enough, thanks very much. He was no history expert, but knew enough to know that wannabe world conquerors rarely died peacefully in their sleep. Though they usually accumulated harems of beautiful women before some Brutus came along to put a violent end to them plunging their literal and figurative swords into everything that moved. So maybe having a go at trampling the world underfoot wasn’t all bad.
Thoughts of forming a harem and making the curvy brunette seated in front of him its first recruit were chased away when Max’s eyes fell on words carved on the wall straight ahead: One Is A Warrior.
Max had been too busy reeling from the flashier parts of the Grand Hall that he hadn’t noticed the phrase before. But now that he was focused on it, he realized the phrase appeared all over the walls, luminescing faintly.
Or at least he assumed the phrase was all over the walls. While the phrase was written in English in several instances and Spanish in others—Max had aced Spanish in high school—a multitude of other languages were carved into the stone walls. Max recognized French, Arabic, and Russian, but couldn’t begin to guess what the dozens of other languages were. He wondered if they all translated into “One is a warrior.”
What’s ‘One is a warrior’ supposed to mean? he wondered. The ‘one’ they’re talking about can’t be me, not after what happened with Sheriff Barker and Stiletto. ‘One got his butt handed to him,’ is more like it.
Max’s musings were interrupted by cackling in the row ahead of him. Three guys were elbowing each other and laughing obnoxiously. Their stage whispers were impossible to miss.
“You think they’ll charge her double for lunch?” a white guy with an English accent snickered.
“Double? More like quadruple,” scoffed a husky black guy. “She’s so fat, her blood type is O-Zempic.”
“Maybe she is lunch,” said the tallest Latino Max had ever seen. “I’ve never had whale before, but I’ll try anything once.”
“TMI, bro.”
“Why’d she even bother coming to the academy? Probably can’t climb a step stool without getting winded. Should’ve enrolled at Dairy Queen instead.”
“You see those sloppy udders? Dairy Queen’s probably gonna be her code name.”
They all laughed and continued their roast. Each comment they made was more biting than the last.
The target of their commentary was a blonde girl several seats from them. Max thought she was pretty, but there was no disputing she was plus-sized. She wasn’t as big as a lot of people Max saw back home—Mississippi had one of the highest obesity rates in the United States—but the blonde girl seemed larger than she actually was next to the other first years, most of whom were in shape. Some were so fit, they looked like professional athletes.
Though the blonde girl stared straight ahead, not looking at the three boys insulting her, it was clear she heard every cutting word since her face got redder and redder the longer the boys carried on. The volume at which they spoke and the way they pointedly looked at the girl told Max they wanted her to hear them. Certainly everyone in their vicinity did. Most who overheard ignored the boys. A few looked uncomfortable at the escalating insults, but didn’t speak up.
Jerks! Max thought. That girl’s just been sitting there, minding her own business, and yet she’s still getting picked on. If there was one thing Max couldn’t stand, it was a bully. It was why he hated Sheriff Barker so much. His fists clenched in anger.
Damian put a hand on Max’s forearm. “I’ve found that the best way to get along, is to go along,” Damian murmured quietly.
Max snatched his arm away, annoyed that his mounting outrage was so easy to read. “I wasn’t going to do anything,” he whispered back fiercely.
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That was the truth—as much as he wanted to, he hadn’t planned to confront the boys. He had to keep his eyes on the prize: escaping this place. Until he figured out a way to do so, he needed to blend in, not make waves.
Even so, he was on the verge of standing and knocking the three boys’ heads together like they were the Three Stooges when something happened to make the boys shut up on their own:
All three of their mouths sealed shut.
Mouthless as partially-sculpted clay dolls, the boys stared at each other in terror, their eyes wide and frantic. They clawed at the smooth skin that had replaced their lips, their muffled screams barely audible. Confusion and mounting panic spread through those seated around them as whispers and murmurs filled the hall. Only the plus-sized girl continued to stare straight ahead, not so much as glancing over at the mouthless boys and the commotion they caused. It seemed to Max the girl was fighting back a smile. If she wasn’t the one responsible for the boys’ creepy transformation, Max thought, he would eat the fist sculpture.
But just as the commotion threatened to become a riot, the lights of the Grand Hall began to dim. The boys’ mouths returned. With gasping breaths, the three boys looked at each other, disbelief and fear on their faces. They fell silent, their previous bravado replaced by shock. The students around them exchanged bewildered looks.
All the lights in the Grand Hall faded, including the fires, as if everything was hooked up to the same dimmer switch. The rippling black screens on the walls hummed faintly, then turned gray and emitted light beams which converged over the heads of the assembled first years. Max craned his neck with everyone as figures and locales coalesced blurrily overhead, then snapped into clear focus.
Max realized with a start he was looking at holograms. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised after dealing with the servitors and seeing the other futuristic tech Prometheus Academy had access to. But it was still unnerving to watch totally lifelike figures moving overhead, like gravity was just a figment of their imagination.
Max tore his eyes off the holograms long enough to take a quick glance around. Based on the astonished look on the faces of the other first years as they stared upward slack-jawed, he wasn’t the only one stunned by the technological wizardry.
Orchestral music began playing as several holographic scenes unfolded, too many to take in all at once. Max focused on the three closest to him:
In one scene, a costumed man robbed a bank. Levitating a few feet off the ground, he was sheathed in a luminescent pink aura, as were clusters of gold bars that were floating out of a ripped-apart vault, through the bank lobby, and out of front doors torn from their hinges. Armed guards lay sprawled on the ground, pinned down by the same pink force around the levitating man and the gold.
Another scene took place in the White House’s Oval Office. Though the hologram was soundless, former President Gomez was clearly yelling at a gaggle of military officers clustered around the President’s Resolute Desk. The officers trooped out of the Oval Office, looking both chastened and frightened. After the door closed behind them, the President’s body shifted and warped, as if made of putty rapidly re-shaped by an expert sculptor. The President’s familiar brown-skinned masculine face was replaced by a feminine one nearly as famous.
Max gasped. The person now seated at the Resolute Desk was Potemkin, a notorious shapeshifting Villain. The silver-haired, blue-eyed woman looked down, seeming to stare right at Max. She winked with a sly smile, obviously aware she was being recorded. Max couldn’t help but wonder if Potemkin was the real reason behind President Gomez’s erratic behavior that wound up getting him impeached and removed from office. But his removal hadn’t been soon enough to prevent him from starting the Second Mexican War, which led to the United States’ annexation of large swaths of Mexico, just as the original 19th-century Mexican War had. Because of the Second Mexican War, Canada, all the Central American countries, several South American nations, and what was left of Mexico signed a mutual defense pact against the United States.
The third holographic scene displayed probably the most famous Villain versus Hero battle of Max’s lifetime: Bastion versus the Pinnacle. Before the Pinnacle faced off against Bastion in midtown Manhattan, the seven-member group had billed itself as “The World’s Only Undefeated Hero Team.” They couldn’t call themselves that after encountering Bastion, though, because the super-strong Villain had smashed through them as easily as a wrecking ball through toilet paper walls. Max found himself wincing as Bastion grabbed Carapace by his armored shell and flung him through a skyscraper. The Pinnacle disbanded a few months after their rout at the hands of Bastion; rumor had it they were sick of being the butt of everyone’s jokes. Their fall from grace probably wouldn’t have been so swift if they hadn’t spent years bragging about how powerful they were.
The orchestral music swelled heroically. The blatant pro-Villain slant of the holographic displays combined with the swelling orchestration seemed to proclaim that the Villains, not the so-called Heroes, were the true protagonists.
As the music reached its crescendo, a resonant voice rang out, filling the Grand Hall with its words:
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle.
“Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”
Suddenly, the music stopped. The holograms faded away, and the projectors that had created them reverted to their inky blackness. Spotlight drones swooped forward to illuminate a podium on a stage rising from the floor before the assembled students.
A towering black man in a somber suit and tie strode into the limelight pooled around the podium. His body language was commanding, his weathered dark face as grave and noble as an Easter Island head. The man reminded Max of the turkey vultures that soared over Mississippi on their huge wings: he had a broad, beaklike nose; close-cropped ginger hair; dark pigmentation; slightly stooped shoulders; and arms that seemed too long for his body despite how tall he was. If the man flapped his vulture arms and sailed toward Max with the intent of pecking his eyes out, Max would have been only vaguely surprised. After all he’d been through since encountering Stiletto, Max’s surprise circuits were almost completely blown.
“One is a warrior,” the man repeated, the deep voice from before obviously belonging to him. Despite no obvious microphones or speakers, Max heard the man speak as clearly as if the man were seated next to him, speaking directly in his ear. “The Greek philosopher Heraclitus penned those words millennia ago. They have survived the fall of entire civilizations because the truth is immortal.
“Most people are little more than non-player characters,” the man continued. “Moist robots controlled by unexamined programming imposed by a culture callous to the best interests of the individual. But a perceptive select few are able to transcend their programming, to have the wit to peer behind the curtain to see who really pulls the strings. And to depose the puppeteer if they have the skill and will to do so.
“The mere fact you have enrolled in this institution proves that you are among the select perceptive few. You have the wit to peer behind the curtain. To search for the puppeteer. This academy will give you the skills to depose him. The only question remaining is if you have the will to do so.
“One is a warrior,” the man repeated again. “That is the academy’s official motto, which is why you see the phrase engraved on these walls and throughout the castle. Will you be that free-thinking warrior, or merely society’s cannon fodder? A follower, or a leader? The puppet, or the puppeteer?
“Over the next four years, we’ll find out.
“My name is Strategos, headmaster of this august institution. Welcome to your new home. Welcome to Prometheus Academy.”