The battle horn sounded the beginning of the paintball war, but there were no dramatic charges. The makeshift alliance of the Einstein-Odinson and Zeus-Stephanides students stayed aboard their ship, and the more organized armies of the Allied Schools stayed inside their fortifications, hiding behind high walls and their many defensive countermeasures. Vell stood on the prow of the ship and watched a few Anansi-Clark students sprint their way towards a new defensive emplacement. He’d spent a little too long staring at one of their defensive positions, and they were reshuffling their troops to reinforce whatever he was looking at.

“It is weird how much attention they’re paying to you,” Jay said, as he approached.

“Honestly this feels pretty standard, at this point,” Vell said. “Everything good to go?”

“As good as it’s going to get, under the circumstances,” Jay said. “Kanya’s finishing up her troop review now.”

For some reason Kanya and Vell had both insisted that she get the chance to manually look over the Zeus-Stephanides students. Kanya was apparently a meticulous heist planner, but that seemed excessive even by the most ludicrous level of attention to detail. Vell did not seem at all bothered by the delay, so Jay waited patiently right alongside him until Kanya popped up from below deck.

“Okay, you’re good to go,” Kanya said. She saluted and then returned below decks. As she was not a student anymore, she could only be involved in planning, not any of the actual warfare. Vell returned her salute and turned to his troops. Despite the circumstances, Vell had opted to keep all his friends close by. Even with all the countermeasures the other schools had apparently set up, Vell seemed to believe their best chance was to keep his friends and allies together.

“Okay, boss, we heading right to the magic jammer?”

“No.”

“Then let’s- no?”

“No,” Vell repeated. Alex adjusted her glasses, as if that would do anything.

“Then...where are we going?”

“Marine biology lab,” Vell said. “Skye’s going to mix up some mutagens.”

“I am?”

This plan was news to Skye as well. Not that she didn’t want to mix up mutagens, but Vell rarely asked her to. He considered self-mutation a method of last resort.

“Yeah. There’s no jammer that can shut down chemical or biological reactions,” Vell said. “Not without killing everyone on the island.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Hawke said.

“It’ll be fine,” Vell insisted. “We get to the lab, then we can get Skye to give us like, mantis shrimp reaction time, or hammerhead shark electrosensitivity.”

“Or both,” Skye suggested. “I can also do crab claw, goblin shark mouth, jellyfish stingers, sea turtle flippers-”

“Babe, they get it,” Vell said.

“I’m not even a tenth of the way done!”

“We can talk options once we get to the lab,” Vell said. “And maybe just, I don’t know, write it down.”

“Okay, somebody make a group chat, I’ll write out the list and pin it.”

The group set out, and several minutes into their march, Skye was still typing. Hawke felt continually concerned about that, until his concerns about their combat status won out. The Allied School army had set up checkpoints and defensive emplacements across the island, but they all backed off and ran away as soon as Vell approached, which somehow made Hawke even more nervous.

“I don’t like the way they’re all running from us,” Hawke said. “They’re up to something.”

“Consolidating forces, most likely,” Luke said. “If they fought us four or five at a time, they’d lose for sure, and risk us capturing their paintballs. They won’t engage until they have overwhelming force.”

“Is it too late to get Patschke-Puck back?” Hawke said. “I liked it better when our opponents were stupid.”

“It’s more dramatic this way, at least,” Luke said. “Hopefully it stretches things out a bit. I haven’t really gotten to do anything in any of these paintball wars, I want to get a chance to shine.”

A paintball thwapped into the side of his head not a second after Luke finished the sentence.

“Snipers! Run!”

Those who remained took off running, but Alex took a paintball to the left shoulder before she could get started.

“They’re coming from the left!”

Goldie took a paintball to the right hip.

“And the right, I guess,” Alex said. “Just assume they’re coming from everywhere!”

“Way ahead of you!”

Paintballs splattered at their heels as Vell and his remaining friends dashed for cover. They found the nearest building, threw open the doors, and dove in. Vell, the other loopers, and Skye all had the common sense to hit the deck immediately, but a few more of Vell’s friends got hit by paintballs as they barged through the door. Now that he was in a smaller space and could return fore more easily, Vell drew his guns and fired off a few quick shots at his attackers. His first volley hit the mark, and every enemy grabbed their guns and retreated right away. Vell made use of the time to reload, but no more attacks came.

“Not a bad ambush,” Vell said. “Who all did we lose?”

“Looks like Luke, Alex, Goldie, couple others” Kim said. “Most of us got clear. Jay, Moses, where are we?”

“Zoology lab central building,” Jay said. “That’s good. As long as we dodge any more ambushes, I think we’ve got the advantage indoors.”

“Looks like they’re boxing us in, though,” Moses said. He glanced through a window and could see Allied School students moving in the distance.

“We’ll get around,” Vell said. “Jay, what’s the basement situation like here?”

“We have them,” Jay said. “Why are you asking?”

“Do you not have an elaborate network of underground labs and storage areas?”

“No?”

“Why not? You’ve got actual ground to dig into,” Samson said. The Einstein-Odinson campus had somehow acquired an entire labyrinth below it despite being artificial.

“I’ll bring it up when it’s time for renovation,” Jay said. “But right now if we want a network of secret tunnels we’re going to have to dig them ourselves. Which I guess we could do, if Skye turns us into mole men, or something.”

“Eh,” Skye said, as she cringed. “I technically could, but I don’t have a lot of experience with terrestrial animal DNA. I can’t guarantee it’d work. Or be safe.”

“We can stick to shovels, then.”

“Well I could still do something, but most burrowing sea creatures are only optimized to dig through the silt on the sea floor, not the dense stone. Maybe with some experimental changes…”

“Definitely shovels,” Jay said.

Vell took a look out the window and saw more enemy students moving around outside. Some of them even started to move in response to him staring out the window. Perfect.

“We’ll deal with that as it comes,” Vell said. “Right now we need that lab.”

“Right. This way.”

Jay took the lead again, and headed down the halls of the central zoology lab. Every subdivision was branched off the main building through a series of interconnected hallways, meaning they had a lot of doors to open. They went through each one carefully, on the look out for further ambushes, but found nothing but empty halls.

“Okay, last door,” Jay said. “If there’s going to be trouble, it’s going to be here.”

They all held their breath as Jay slammed the doors open and dove for cover, but no paintballs started flying. Behind the door was the only thing worse than an ambush: nothing. An aggressive amount of nothing, even.

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

“Oh come on, this has to be against the rules,” Moses said.

The entire lab had been stripped of anything usable. A few scattered beakers and empty test tubes laid sideways on barren countertops and in empty cabinets, while desks stood with their drawers opened and ransacked. The only thing they’d left behind were a few fish in the tanks and a few containers of food to feed them with.

“This isn’t even paintball, this is just theft,” Jay said. “They stole that shit.”

“We should’ve guessed this would happen,” Skye sighed. “They’d been watching you, of course they knew what I could do.”

“I mean, yeah, I was expecting them to try and stop us, but this is excessive,” Vell said. He grabbed a beaker and examined it. It looked like they had actually poured out the contents before abandoning the lab. “Jay’s right, this isn’t a paintball thing, this is just crime. Someone’s going to get arrested for this.”

“I’d call the cops myself if my phone worked,” Jay said.

“Hold on. Give me that,” Skye said. She snatched the vial out of Vell’s hand and wafted the fumes towards her nose. “I could probably get a drop out of this…”

She scouted the room and examined various containers and vials, finding trace leftovers of different chemicals. She collected everything she could find, using pipettes and swabs to collect as much of everything as possible, muttering various chemical names and quantities under her breath as she worked.

“Okay, I think I’ve got something,” Skye said. “I’ll have to use some water as a base, which will dilute the effect, but I should be able to make a growth serum.”

“Okay, that’s definitely something,” Cane agreed. “How big is it going to make me?”

“Cane, why are you assuming it’s you?”

“No one else is volunteering and I want to be huge,” Cane said. “So, how big are we talking?”

“You? Maybe twenty feet tall,” Skye said.

“So not really big enough for you all to take cover behind my foot, or something,” Cane said. “I’ll still do it.”

“No, no, we need everyone we’ve got on the field,” Vell said. “What we need is to make something else big. Something that could distract everyone out there long enough for us to get away.”

Vell glanced casually at the fish and shook his head. Nothing aquatic would work. As he pondered options, Jay and Moses shared a forlorn look, and then sighed together.

“And we put so much effort into making sure he wouldn’t get out today.”

----------------------------------------

More than three-thousand students from the Allied Schools had formed up around the zoology lab, guns drawn and trained on every possible exit. A window opened, and hundreds of students reshuffled their positions, placing themselves in front of the window.

“Come on, you arrogant bastards,” one of the snipers said. “Show us a single hair…”

They did not get to see a hair. All they got was feathers. Aetos the Eagle, the Zeus-Stephanides mascot, alighted on the frame, curiously examining his new surroundings for exactly half a second before multiple paintballs pelted his shining brown feathers. He let out a squawk of distress and started to flap his wings.

“Just a bird,” one of the soldiers said. “Must be a distraction.”

The soldiers altered their focus as Aetos took off and started flying towards them.

“Is that bird getting bigger?”

“No dumbass, it’s getting closer,” another said. “It’s called perspect-”

The condescension turned to screaming as Aetos, who was now double his original size, swooped down on the arrogant student and carried him off in his talons. He dropped the student after carrying him a few feet, and then swooped down to grab another (both of them entirely unharmed, thanks to an antigravity safe-landing system the Zeus-Stephanides campus had to help safeguard its high cliffs). It only took two eagle abductions to make most of the students panic, and those who didn’t flee outright were preoccupied trying to dodge the eagle or dissuade it from further attacks via paintballs. In the midst of the chaos, Vell and his friends slipped out, cutting their way through a disorganized line with a few tactical shots from Vell, and headed up the island cliffs. One student tried to call out their movement and reorganize the troops, and was promptly snatched up by Aetos. Moses watched in mild horror as the enemy student got picked up and then dropped to the ground (harmlessly).

“I am not looking forward to having to catch him later today,” Moses said.

“It’ll be fine, he’ll shrink after like ten minutes,” Skye said. “He’s also going to be really tired, the metabolic process of getting that big is exhausting.”

“Oh. That’s not so bad.”

“For us,” Jay said, as another student got swooped upon. He turned his back on the avian assault and focused on the path forward.

“Okay, where to next?”

“Where’s your dining hall?”

“Up this slope, bit to the west,” Jay said. “Why, do they have something stored there?”

“No, it’s just lunchtime,” Vell said. “What kind of options do you have, is there a Pierro’s Pizza here?”

“No, we have a Pietro’s Pizza though,” Jay said. Vell rolled his eyes. Of course they had a slightly off-brand Pierro’s. “Are we seriously stopping for lunch?”

“Can’t fight an army on an empty stomach,”Vell said. “I’m pretty sure Sun Tzu said something like that.”

“Is that really the smartest thing we can do?”

“First of all, I really am very hungry,” Vell said. All this walking up and down slopes was building a hell of an appetite. “And secondly-”

He took a quick look around and then leaned over to whisper to Jay.

“-It’s really going to mess with these guys heads.”

“It can’t possibly be that easy.”

----------------------------------------

Atop the fortified spires of the rocky cliffs, a great armored citadel had been constructed, fortified against all attack by man, magic, or mechanics. There among the armored throngs of warriors and the waving banners of their alliance, The Council of Seven, the appointed leaders of the Allied Schools, sat and watched with rapt attention as Vell ate a hoagie. They had hacked security cameras trained on his every move, and most of his moves consisted of adjusting his grip on the sandwich so all the fillings didn’t fall out. One of the members of the Council returned from a brief aside to his troops and tuned back into the endless video feed.

“Any updates?”

“He lost a chunk of tomato out the left side.”

“Any important updates?”

“It’s pretty much just the tomato,” another council member said.

“Surely he’s plotting something with his war council in there.”

“We’re trying to listen in, but it’s spotty,” the Coyote-Oppenheimer council member said. “We’re moving in a sturdier device soon.”

“I’m beginning to think he actually is just eating lunch in there,” someone else mumbled.

“The dining hall is one of the most defensible positions in the entire campus,” another council member snapped. “He wouldn’t choose it on a whim. He’s trying to lure us into an ill-advised attack, funnel us through chokepoints.”

“It won’t work, nor will any more sudden surprises,” the Sun Wukong-Wu commander said. “We have all our forces at a distance, in sniper positions. An insurmountable position, with ample time to retreat from any more unpleasant diversions.”

“But plenty of room for them to maneuver. We expect the unexpected.”

“Our defenses are holding and the vast majority of those egotistical bastards are still cowering on their ship. Perhaps we should fortify, aim to prolong the game and force a stalemate.”

The very suggestion was met with angry glares and forceful fists pounded against tables.

“We will not claim a victory by default,” the Coyote-Oppenheimer leader spat. “We prove we’re better than them with a crushing victory. Nothing more, nothing less.”

One of the forward scouts returned and saluted the entire room.

“My lords, the listening device is placed.”

“Very good. Now make haste, and return to your post,” a commander said. “We must have eyes on the enemy at all times.”

The scout saluted once more and went back into the field while the commanders accepted their device and plugged in the audio feed.

“Now, let’s see what you have to say, Vell Harlan…”

“Look, I know I’m not that handsome, I can accept most criticism on my appearance,” Vell said. “It’s just kind of confusing why everyone thinks my ass is ‘surprisingly’ good.”

Nobody at the war council said anything, but the conversation at the lunch table continued.

“We’ve been over this, Vell, it’s because you’re so skinny,” Cane said. “People with a build like you aren’t supposed to have an ass like that.”

“Now, be fair, I haven’t met many people with a build like Vell,” Hanifa added. “Maybe everyone that tall and that skinny has a nice ass.”

“We’d have to run experiments,” Freddy said. “I do know an assologist.”

One of the Council of Seven ran a hand along their face.

“Can we shut this off now?”

“Silence, you fool,” another snapped. “They could be speaking in code.”

“Ass-based code?”

“The enemy is crafty.”

They fell silent as another round of conversation began.

“Okay, that’s lunch done,” Vell said. He snatched a chunk of tomato off his plate and snacked on it before continuing. “Everyone ready to go?”

“That depends entirely on where we’re going,” Kim said. “I feel like we haven’t made much progress yet, Vell, we need to hit an important target.”

The Council members leaned in with anticipation.

“And we will,” Vell said. “But I’m not going to tell you where we’re going yet. They’re listening.”

The members of the Council held their breath, as if silence could somehow save them through a camera lens.

“Listening?” Jay said. “I know they’re watching, but are you sure they can hear us?”

“Reasonably,” Vell said. “But you might be right. Let’s just get out of here and shoot down everyone at the west door.”

Vell looked to the western window, and saw the distant enemy soldiers flinch. He turned back to his friends and shrugged in the direction of the window.

“Point proven,” Kim said. “Lead the way.”

“Just follow me,” Vell said. “Once we get to the top of the hill, everything else will fall into place.”

Vell stood up, and his friends followed. The members of the council also stood, mouths agape in shock.

“The top of the hill! He means to attack us!”

“Cut off the head to kill the snake,” another gasped. “With us defeated our forces would fall to disarray.”

“We cannot allow it. Recall our forces, fortify all defenses! With haste!”

Five of the seven council members sped off to their forces, while two remained.

“Hold, Coyote,” the Sun Wukong-Wu member said. “I would have words with you.”

The other commander nodded, and stepped in close. The Wukong-Wu commander looked around to check that they were truly alone before leaning in.

“Is there a reason we’re all talking like some kind of medieval LARP?”

“No, not really,” the Coyote representative said. She shrugged and allowed her stiff, squared shoulders to droop. “I think somebody made the banners and it all kind of spiraled out from there. You know, aesthetically.”

“That makes sense.”

“Do you want it to stop? Because I could bring it up, you know, it kind of slows down conversations.”

“No, no, I think the guys are having fun with it,” the Wukong rep said. She nodded towards the door the others had fled through. “I don’t want to be a killjoy.”

“Right, might as well enjoy ourselves,” the Coyote rep said. She then cleared her throat. “So, uh, you have plans after this?”

“Going back to China, mostly.”

“Oh, right, naturally,” the Coyote rep said. She cleared her throat again and headed out alongside her counterpart.

“You seem cool, it’s just a distance thing, you know, it’d feel silly starting something and then having an ocean between us.”

“I get it, let’s move on,” the Coyote rep said. “Places to go, vendettas to fulfill, that sort of thing.”

“I just don’t want it to be awkward.”

“You refusing to end this conversation is the awkward part, please let us move on.”

They both continued on in a deeply undignified and deeply awkward silence.