6.1 June's briefing
Today, their leader assembly is led by the short old man who saved Maeven from Captain Eyeshot’s prolonged disciplining at the welcoming congregation, Captain June Everolt. He stands in front of them on the stage of the Main Hall, eyeing the ground. Below, the company leaders are spaced out in a square, where someone sighs deeply.
“Hello everyone,” he says. His words lag, his voice is scratchy. We’re going to listen to this for an hour? Maeven imagines the assignees thinking. The old man seems lost until he perks up suddenly, and the voice jumps from an insecure murmur to a booming projection.
“Fighting is as much in the mind as it is in the physical,” he says. Assignees jolt in her peripheral.
“When you’re in a fight, it is not as simple as merely anticipating what your opponent will do, then acting in accordance to that anticipation, because your opponent will be, more often than not, anticipating what you will do. And so, sometimes this evolves you into anticipating what you think your opponent anticipates you will do. That’s the second iteration. So—and then you can imagine, iteration three: your opponent could be already anticipating even that!”
Now she’s the one thinking it: We’re going to listen to this for an hour?
“Stendahl!” he calls. “Enlighten me with a fourth iteration.”
Victor thinks for a moment, leaping his index back and forth as he slowly strings it together. “You anticipate what your opponent anticipates what you will do…because of what you anticipate your opponent will do…and your opponent anticipates that.”
“Perfect!”
The captain doesn’t cease there. He details more iterations with excruciating brevity. An unstoppable paradox. She could smell their brains whittle trying to comprehend it.
“There better be a point to this,” Ina mutters in her direction.
It’s a re-hash of OPTI8640. Analogising combat to something like a chess game. She remembers theories of fighter behaviour, plotted into formulas and matrices and giving them names like ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ and ‘Chicken Game.’ The way Captain June explains it however, it’s meticulous to a fault. Despite this she notices Victor rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“Riel!” the captain calls next. They’re on the eighth iteration, that’s a paragraph to say aloud. If she cowers into her collar and doesn’t say anything, maybe—
“Come up and help me,” he commands, eyes locking.
She leaves to the stage.
“Riel here is from the best Will Academy of the United Lands,” the captain announces as she climbs to the platform. Maybe I didn’t want everyone knowing that. She slides her hands in her VR jacket.
“Do not be afraid. In a moment, I’m going to call my Will. And it’s going to be very, very safe,” he says.
Maeven stops. I’m going to be attacked? Captain June waves his hand in a shooing motion and she retraces a couple steps across the wooden stage. Aside from Ina and Victor, the assignees look scared.
They wait for something to happen. Maeven stares at Captain June and Captain June grins back. Everyone’s stalled for so long that she desires face the audience and apologise on his behalf, until there’s a long, crisp inhale.
June has breathed in deep. Real deep. Chest ballooning under his short-sleeved button up, his Will begins to surge. He places an open palm under his chin as if to catch something, and he blows.
Fire bouquets from his mouth. A wall of yellow flames bursting with Resonance, spanning the stage and closing in on her. She feels the onslaught of muggy heat. Alarm bells.
Maeven cloaks her legs with Will. She jumps and clutches at the ceiling. Her hands find a support beam. She leverages to flip herself upright to see the captain down on the stage as the flames fizzle out, mouth widening in excitement.
“Aha!” Captain June roars.
The other assignees have lost sight of her, until they follow the Captain’s gaze upward.
“How many iterations did you go through in your mind just now?”
“Uh, two?” she answers breathlessly.
“Incorrect!”
Someone answers one, another answers three. He declares, “Incorrect!” at every poor attempt.
“Can you teach us how to use an MR-16?” someone suggests.
“The model is impracticable!” June reveals, voice echoing in a trailing silence. Maeven can still feel her heart pounding.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Such analysis is a freedom, you see? It is unthinkable to those within the ring! Fighting, at its rawest experience, is a concourse of act or react. A wordless mind game of reflex and intuition. Number Fifteen…” He wiggles his finger at her. “…escaped the assault, then immediately upon gaining her footing anticipated further attack.” He demonstrates by widening his stance and stretching his hands out, mimicking her. Still mimicking her. Maeven drops from the beam and neutralises herself immediately.
“…All in the fraction of a second. That is the work of a wordless tactician. And that’s what sixteen years at an Academy will teach ya.”
She looks to the stage. No burn marks. It’s like the fire never manifested.
“Now enough of this, shall we?” says June. “Let us try it for ourselves.”
Captain June requests a circle be cleared from the middle of the carpet. A minute later, the assignees have shuffled to make the room. Captain June stands near the edge of the human-bordered ring with Maeven standing just behind, when he proposes with a raised hand, “Who wants to fight Maeven?”
The assignees look amongst each other. There are mutters in the crowd as Maeven thinks, surely not. There’s got to be better ways to spend the rest of their leader’s briefing.
“May you never get the chance to spar with a Larosa kid,” the old man intones.
“What’s the rules?” someone asks.
“It’ll be…a boxing match!”
“I’ll go.”
A hand raises in the crowd. The assignees part to let them forward.
It’s Ina.
“Kotov! Of course,” says June.
Maeven says, “Captain June, I don’t really—”
“Oh nonsense!” He tosses his hands without looking at her. Three metres ahead, Ina’s cracking her knuckles and stepping back into an orthodox stance. “Boxing, right?”
“Boxing!” confirms June. “And pardon me, I didn’t think to pack gloves.”
Ina rocks on her lead foot. “We can start?”
Maeven jerks into the circle.
“Yes right now begin!” says June.
Ina raises her fists by her chin. Loose, ready. Maeven raises her fists too, but with a portion of the commitment.
Her guard is lower than she would like it, down by her chin instead of up by her temples. Her chest isn’t as hunched as she would keep it, isn’t as focused as she would feel. She used to do this all the time, back in the Academy. Now, there’s a serious case of ring rust.
Ina jabs. Instantly, Maeven closes her arms to shield her face—she didn’t have to think about it. There’s another jab, then two more. They’re experiments, Maeven begins to remember. Ina is testing her reactions.
Her opponent throws a lead hook, aimed at her right ear. Again, no thoughts. Maeven weaves under it and circles right. On the inside, she’s surprised at her own reaction.
“Ooh!” goes the leaders.
But she still could have countered. She was open for a cross and her muscle memory was there but she didn’t take it. This is just the VR. Ina’s just some snake User. And as if to acknowledge Maeven’s passivity, Ina drops her guard and rocks forward, exposing her head.
Hit me, come on I’m right here, the gesture says.
Maeven doesn’t go for it.
Ina narrows her eyes. She jabs again. And again Maeven closes her forearms over her face; they’re nothing but little taps. Something slicks past under her elbows, Ina’s knuckles launching at her chin the steep price of an uncommitted defence: an uppercut.
Maeven whips her head back to avoid it. Ina ducks out of view.
She feels the hem of her undershirt being pulled and cold hands pressing on the sides of her abdomen. Goosebumps sprout. Maeven jumps back. “What the hell!” She rubs at the icy lingering. “What was that for?”
Ina smirks, backgrounded by a crowd of confused assignees.
She touched me, Maeven realises. She tried to do that last time, when the green viper curled out of her sleeve.
Physical contact is how Ina activates her Will. She unzips her jacket and looks under her shirt.
There it is. Writhing under her clothes, a boa constrictor coils up her chest, punctures its fangs into her side.
Her muscles electrify. She bends to the carpet, feeling her body slowly squeeze itself into a sustained contraction. Ina pushes her down and mounts on top of her as the observing leaders go wild. Ocean’s leader must be done for.
Maeven feels her shoulder being pinned. Ina is reeling her fist back to catch her in a ground-and-pound.
Something starts to flicker.
The little ration of Will that Maeven still has after her Will Block: Intuition.
Ina’s Will, a thick vapor that crawls in the air, must be distributed with enough diligence to make any of its manifestations effective. It can be a fragile game of scarcity for Users whose power volume is small or still-developing. To Maeven, there’s a scale in her head that’s telling her: Nope, not enough. The boa constrictor hasn’t locked in yet, it’s still concretising into the world.
All in all, if you haven’t devoted enough Will, you haven’t really done anything.
Maeven flares her Will. With a forceful push of her body the snake’s hold snaps loose. It starts to goo just like the tree viper, sliding off her skin.
Months of inactivity couldn’t shake her from the instinct. Now able to move, she cups Ina by the underarm, pushes her aside. Maeven pulls her knee free from the mount. She snatches Ina’s foot, locks her legs. Ina’s toes are pulled under her armpit to hold her in a heel hook. With her flared Will, Ina’s in extreme discomfort. The hold puts her ankle joint under a terrible stress test.
Maeven’s head shoots up at the captain.
He’s nodding. “You’re doing good.”
“She mounted me, Captain. We’re not boxing anymore.”
“I never said I was a referee.”
“She used her Will.” How could she? Without warning, in front of all these people. The captain glances past her. “She’s going to snap your foot, Ina!”
A few more seconds, Ina taps on the carpet. She’s forfeited. Maeven lets go at once, and the User’s foot springs away the second her heel hook unlatches. Sand Company’s leader stands slowly, hands posted on the carpet.
“Bravo! Well done Riel! And you, Ina!” says June, applauding. Ina doesn’t turn. They exit on opposite sides of the circle.
Someone claps her on the shoulder. Another assignee extends his hand.
I beat her.
At first, she felt awkward and unpractised. But everything just clicked into place. Her Will, what’s left of it anyway, was still strong enough to overcome the boa constrictor in the moment it was still realising.
She flexes her hand as she walks behind the edge of the crowd.
That felt kind of good.
Captain June lets the other leaders spar until the end of the briefing. He doesn’t stop them when they pull their shirts off over their heads, wrestle each other to the ground; only in the moments before someone gets too hurt.
At 0700, they’re dismissed. Captain June encourages the leaders to pass on their learnings to their respective companies, as they leave sweat-soaked with smiles on their faces.
When she exits, Captain Eyeshot is leaning against the wall out in the hallway. She’d been standing there for a while, in fact. They look at each other. Maeven pays mind. Captain Eyeshot says nothing.
As she turns to head for cafeteria duty, she can feel the captain’s eyes searing into her back.