Minerva and I continued training for the next couple weeks, with her taking me through more advanced tactics as we dealt with a progression of relatively straightforward river monsters – mostly giant animals.
You’d think a giant otter would be easy, but those fuckers are quick, even when they’re big, and they have surprisingly sharp teeth.
Minerva was constantly mixing up our positions, forcing me to practice ranged attacks, until I could strategically knock enemies back, giving her an opening to hit weak spots.
I thought my artillery stuff was too sloppy and too big to use in team fights, until she explained that I wasn’t doing ranged stuff to win battles; she was teaching me how to use ranged attacks to create weaknesses in her opponents, distracting them, forcing them off balance - punishing them when they stepped out of position, so Minerva had time to do combos.
We got really good at catching each other, as various monsters knocked us back or took us off our feet, seamlessly switching positions to take over the front line, if a monster ever got the upper hand.
Minerva never needed healing, being immune to most kinds of injury, and she regenerated faster than a demon, on those rare occasions something hit hard enough to hurt her.
We finally got good enough at anticipating each other’s movements, she said she was going to risk using the Brand of Athena at close range, the flaming magic rope she wore on her hip.
“What even is that thing?”
“A weapon that cuts through armor and magic defenses. I didn’t ask for it, it just appeared in my hand when I was sixteen, when the doctors finally found something strong enough to pierce my skin. It means a lot to me, because I think it came directly from grandma.”
I peered at the rope, and the end of it rose up like a snake, moving all by itself. It creeped me out for a moment, until I realized what it was.
“Oh,” I said. “You’re not an intelligent rope, you’re the owl! What’s up, buddy?”
I held my hand up and the rope smacked it in a kind of high five, proving that the owl had precise control over this, and the brand could touch things or restrain things without burning them, if it really needed to.
Minerva said she had been reluctant to use this weapon around me because it could probably cut through my wards, and if I ended up standing in the wrong place during a fight, I might really get hurt.
But she said we had been working together long enough now that she was willing to risk it.
The monster fights went a lot quicker after that, as the brand cut through damn near anything, including a giant lobster shell that had resisted the best punches I could throw at it.
“If that weapon is so good, why haven’t you been using it this whole time?”
“Because I’m not here to win monster fights, I’m training you to win monster fights, and you won’t learn anything if I do all the work for you.”
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“So, why are you using it now?”
“I’m teaching you to avoid hazards on the battlefield. Hardest part of working with a team is avoiding friendly fire. You already know how to avoid lines of gunfire, now you need practice dodging energy blasts and melee.
“The brand is tricky, and can arc in weird ways with no notice, so you have to keep one eye on it, and make damn sure you stay out of the way. After training to avoid this, avoiding swords and hammers should be easy.”
But it wasn’t all ranged and support training. Minerva was taking me through more advanced approaches for strong heroes; not full-on acrobatics, but leaps and feints and quick combinations meant to keep giant opponents off balance – moves that would have been impossible if I didn’t have levitation boosting me up and down, with a fortitude spell to keep my wind up.
“Minerva, the stuff you’re teaching me, a lot of this is straight out of the Captain Cobalt cartoon. I didn’t think half this shit was real.”
“Did they really put some of this in the cartoon? ” Minerva asked. “I never watched it. Was it good?”
“I… Yeah, it was good.”
* * *
Lydia was still keeping her distance, leaving me with long stretches of free time to twiddle my thumbs and stalk my trainer.
Public records confirmed that Minerva had joined Bluestar 2 after serving on a training team for young heroes. She was around sixteen in these early promo appearances, strangely fragile in a way she had clearly grown out of.
She smiled all the time in these early videos, a kind of brittle, frozen smile that was unsettling if you looked at it too long. Like she was not just smiling the way somebody taught her to, but smiling like she would get punished if she did it wrong.
News reports on her were scarce and tightly staged, with none of the spontaneous gossip you get about heroes like Sonny Mao, or even like the stuff I found on Denise.
I found a dozen cheesecake photo shoots of her trying to look sexy while an assortment of B-list babes and forgotten celebrities hung on her like she was a lamp post.
I started looking for video of her standing with other heroes, looking for those rare moments when she was smiling for real, standing beside somebody she actually liked.
I identified four people who had apparently been her friends on Bluestar 2, back when B2 team members had actual identities and personalities, before they all started wearing masks. I was able to identify Lido, a Filipino wind goddess who seemed to be made of clouds; Aaron Zendarro, another flying guy with fire powers; a gun guy named Dave Fiocchi; and a psionic guy who called himself Xevius, who had been trying very hard to look like Rasputin, before he turned up dead at the bottom of New York Harbor. And the really creepy part? When they retrieved his body, his brain was missing.
I shouldn’t laugh at the poor guy just for trying to be edgy, since he really did look like Minerva’s friend.
I found a weird pattern when I started researching these guys. All of them had served on Bluestar 2 for a couple years, then they had all been rotated out – not just to other teams around the country, but completely off the grid to places in Wyoming and Utah, to be solo heroes in cities that weren’t big enough to have Bluestar teams of their own. They even sent the fire guy to Alaska for a little while, and the gun guy left the country.
Maybe I was reading too much into facial expressions and body language, but it looked like any time somebody got close to Minerva they were kicked off the team, sometimes in a matter of weeks.
* * *
I tried to ask Minerva about them and quickly regretted it, as the questions seemed to make her sad. She described all these people as friends, to the extent she knew what the word meant, sharing little stories about each of them.
She said she was usually able to establish some kind of working relationship with the men on a team and quickly become “one of the guys,” but the one she really missed was Lido, the wind goddess who seemed to be her only female friend.
“Lido was the only person who could really make me laugh,” Minerva said. “She’s much older than me, and the best part is, I could never hurt her, because unless she’s concentrating, anything you try to touch her with just passes right through.”
I thought this sounded more like a curse than a power, but this was the most emotion I had ever seen from Minerva, and I didn’t want to ruin it.
I finally asked, “Do you know what happened to Xevius?” and she just said, “No.”