10) Training montage.

So what do you train someone to do when they have an expendable body?

Fighting, yes. Focusing on a mix of hard strikes that I could do with my limited agility when it came to moving a limp dead body remotely with my form of force based Brute strength, and grappling because being able to tie down someone with an ice cold corpse getting all personal on them would free up someone else on the team to do something else.

Manifest came up with the idea of bomb disposal, but then he also suggested putting bombs in some of the corpses. His teleportation powers weren't all that useful for direct combat so his mind tended to focus on how he could use other things to take out the bad guys. A walking bomb seemed like a great idea to him.

Working with bombs was a little tricky. I could manipulate my fingers pretty well as long as I could see them. But I didn't have much of a sense of touch, I just felt the resistance. Besides, Manifest, or Manny, could just teleport bombs away rather than risk messing with them.

He nodded at the suggestion. “Unless it has a GPS to set it off if it gets moved around. I got several spots I can send it to all over the city, but if I'm not available, it's still better for you to risk a leftover Talon rather than risk somebody from the bomb squad.

I pointed out that the bomb squad had robots that could do the job, and he pointed out that they cost money while a dead Talon trooper was free.

Okay, he had me there.

Marksmanship training went pretty quick, my aim in a corpse sucked. "Just hook the dead guys up with cattle prods and let me wade into people. If nothing else I can draw fire.” I got a sort of taser called a shock stick instead. It was shorter than a cattle prod but looked more dangerous since it let out a jolt of visible electricity and made an ominous humming noise as long as my finger was on the trigger.

T-rex explained. "It's more scary that way. Intimidating someone is always better than hurting them."

They got me a uniform. A bunch of repurposed Talon Trooper uniforms were painted and dyed all black with a white lyre on the right front and one on the opposite shoulder. Originally a few people who could not be getting paid enough were supposed to get the bodies redressed, instead, I took them over long enough to play dress up with them myself.

Frankly, even to my inexperienced eyes, the body armor and other gear was cheap stuff. But I guess when you use mass produced disposable troops you have to budget to equip them all. Heck, they were doing the same thing with me.

I also did a four week crash course for new heroes concerning people’s rights, rules of evidence, and generally how to be a superhero instead of an overpowered vigilante who would just get people killed.

Yeah. Been there.

All in all, it was pretty much everything I had ever wanted, back when I was twelve years old. Now it was more like drafted into a just war. You can't say no, but you wish they had skipped past you.

Scorn turned out to be a pretty good tenet. She not only took care of the livestock, and the critters but she also weeded the fields. Of course, she was also helping herself to my produce. But I always grew more than I needed anyways, to the point my friends tended to start dodging me around harvest time for fear of more free vegetables than they could possibly eat on their own.

For a while, I was jealous that she had stolen my dog's loyalty. Until her friend, the tiger showed up for the first time. No one was entirely sure what powers Khan had, but considering he had been around for over twenty years since he triggered and escaped from a private zoo, he was either a high ranked Brute or a mid ranked Regenerator. Or both.

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And he loved dogs. Loved scaring the piss out of them anyways.

Which is why the witch didn’t have to call him off my dogs. Muffin peed acid, very smelly, skin melting acid.

That made her a Weird 2 and originally got her sent to the pound. Fortunately, she had been house trained before she triggered on a long car trip. Her boy still managed to make it out most weekends to play with her and Fafnir.

Fafnir breathed out fire when he got excited. Fire Former 1. Khan didn’t like that either.

Both of them were outside dogs by the way.

Scorn actually talked to me for the first time, excluding a few grunts when we had been introduced when I came home to find her sitting on my porch with the dogs on one side and the twelve foot long tiger on the other.

Yes, it was in fact, a very big porch.

My dogs were happy to see me, but Khan slunk off after the witch introduced him so I wouldn’t get freaked out if I spotted him on the property.

“So, you two are friends?”

She narrowed one eye at me. “His intelligence is enhanced to be people smart, and he was raised by humans from when he was a cub. Every now and then he feels the need to be around us, and out in the park, he started to visit me when he felt lonely. I never sought him out to bother him when he didn't want company. Cats like that."

I nodded at that and there was an uncomfortable silence. I guess the cat wasn’t the only one to want company every now and then. “I read somewhere that the more dangerous it is to try to pet an animal, the more tempting it is to do it.” I shook my head sadly. “Wasn’t feeling it.”

That got a sort of amused grimace from her before she bid me goodnight and headed off. I guess I would follow her advice on getting along with cats for her too.

Her relationship with the tiger worked out pretty nicely for both of us. She got veggies from my gardens, and Khan brought her offering like a pet cat but on his scale. So I got a cut of the deer that got dropped off once every week or so instead of the rabbits and quails I normally got on my own. I think mainly because she didn’t have much room in her trailer’s refrigerator.

As summer came to an end I packed a few bags for my new official residence. S-hall. The dormitory for powered students at Concentric University.

Most nights I was planning to head home after classes since I had no interest in hanging out with a bunch of college freshmen, or even seniors. Or at least that was the plan.

But the youngest of the Royals, Fable, had turned eighteen at the end of the summer. Making all of the team members legally adults. Which meant they could now be an official active team. Very active.

And since I wasn’t up to their power levels, and they didn’t want to lose my “field” bodies since as a Regen 3 I had to use up the mass of the bodies to fix them up and keep them usable, I was stuck on monitor duty.

The difference between a Regen 3 and a 4 is that Rank 4 and higher can produce mass out of nowhere or transform matter to rebuild their bodies with. As a two I can starve to death healing my own body, or use up so much muscle mass from a corpse I don't have anything to work as far as getting them up and moving them around unless the body is within a few dozen feet or so from my own.

So for four hours a night, five days a week, I got to spend my evening listening to a group of hormonal eighteen year old playing Superheroes on the official patrol shift they had been assigned in the safest part of the city. Because they demanded to be treated like adults, and that was the compromise they had reached with their parents.

I could have done it from home, at my desk, in my own chair. Or I could have done this in the basement “Clubhouse” at the Academy they had for their training program which was right next door to a twenty four hour cafeteria with free food. But the kids wanted a real base all of their own.

So we had a former secret base underneath an old gas station that had belonged to Dr. Talon when he was still a working Genius 4 at Cortex in good standing before he got into an argument with Core over human augmentation and went rogue.

It once had a set of luxury suites for Talon and his “children,” which had gotten destroyed when the base was found and raided. What was left was the utility room, the support rooms, and the vast room that had once held the vats for his troopers.

In which I got to sit at a budget refurbished communications console. To be fair, the equipment was pretty cutting edge. Last year’s cutting edge, what we had was pass me downs from the Royals parents, but with all the updates for the best games.

Which I couldn't play while on monitor duty. T-rex, Manifest, and Fable hogged all the controllers between them when they got back from their patrols. But late nights and still growing bodies meant I had a good hour to game between feeding the animals in the morning so they didn’t forget about me and the start of classes.

While I couldn't play around while on monitor duty, I could at least study. The computer intelligence, Clovis, was nearly sentient and felt underutilized. Cloe made a good study buddy as well as doing my job.

“Orpheus, I have a 911 alert of a police officer being found in a closet wearing only his underwear at the Tarquin Arena. I believe you should contact the team.”

"This sounds like a job for everyone other than me Clovis. Exactly the kind of mission I love."

Unfortunately for me, Shimmer decided she needed every warm body she could call in to search the arena, as well as one cold one.

So instead of memorizing more medical terminology, I stretched out on a futon that was at least new and opened my eyes to a freshly decanted and still ice cold Orpheus body.