“It’s a really rare Ability. A few standard Users have registered as having it in the past, but it’s more ‘common’ in A-Types. It allows for extreme manipulation of your Device’s weapon call, completely shifting the shape of it.” He waved around an invisible sword, then brought his hands together for a fake, heavy swing. “It’s usually limited to one or two variances, but that’s honestly enough. The Red Tank—Igor Voss—could shift between a Saber-like weapon and a massive Mauler axe pretty much at will. It won him the IS Championship in 2398, like Rei said. He lost in the next years, but only because the other S-Rank Kings and Queens started coming up with tactics designed specifically to counteract Arsenal Shift.”
“The hell?!” Viv exclaimed, and Rei saw her head turn towards him as he finally found the glasses in one of the kitchen’s plasteel cabinets. “You didn’t tell me that was something you might be able to do!”
“I didn’t tell you because it’s not gonna happen,” Rei answered, setting the sink’s temperature to “COLD” with his NOED before filling two cups one after the other. “At least not anytime soon. It’s the kind of Ability most CADs wouldn’t register till A-Rank. B at the earliest.”
“That’s still insane!” Viv insisted as he moved back to the couch and offered Catcher a drink, which the Saber accepted with a word of thanks. “I don’t know of any Abilities exclusive to Duelists that have that sort of versatility.”
“I’m gonna make you wash your ears out,” Rei told her with a snort as he sat down again. “Apparently you can’t hear well. It’s not exclusive. Just more common in Atypicals.”
“Which, if it’s that hard to come by, makes it basically exclusive.” Viv dismissed his correction with a wave. “I’d be happy enough with Break Step and a few other speed-focused Abilities.” She jabbed at an invisible enemy a little too enthusiastically. “Gemela can do a lot of damage if I can get around my opponent’s defenses and specs.”
“Same with my Arthus,” Catcher agreed with a nod. Then he seemed to recall something, looking to Rei. “Did you say what your A-Type is presenting as right now?”
Rei grimaced. “Brawler,” he answered with a sigh. “I’m seeing decent numbers in my Speed, Cognition, and Strength values, but everything else is lagging. I’ve been training with simulations all summer, but hit a wall. Hoping to see better growth once classes start.”
Catcher skated right over the subtle admission that he hadn’t had any private instructors over the break, leading Rei to decide that he did indeed think he could like this energetic suitemate of theirs.
“I’m sure you will, especially if you’re in the lower values like you said. Even the difference in low to high Ds can close fast with the right training, and any Es you might have will definitely jump.” The blond boy grinned. “Apparently we get our class assignments at Commencement. Hopefully we’re in the same section. Would be nice to have some people I—”
The click of a door interrupted him, and all three of them looked around to find a squat, broad-shouldered youth stepping out of his room in uniform, pulling on his cap as he did. Jack Benaly, it transpired, wasn’t tall for a User—maybe 5’ 10” at most—but he was heavy-set and thick around the arms and limbs, with hands so big they looked like he could have punched through a solid steel wall without breaking a sweat.
Which—if his Strength was high enough—wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility, Rei considered.
Benaly didn’t pause as he stepped away from his room and made toward the suite door, though he did nod politely as he passed their group. They watched him go silently, waiting for the front entrance to shut behind him again, before Catcher spoke up once more.
“Speaking of Brawler-Types, apparently Benaly’s one. Maybe he could help you out, Rei? Especially if your A-Type sticks to its form for a bit.”
“Maybe,” Rei said half-heartedly. He hadn’t gotten a bad impression from the massive cadet, but he also hadn’t read any interest to interacting much either.
Benaly’s appearance and exit, though, had reminded him that he still had things to do before the Commencement ceremony, and luckily Viv seemed to have recalled the same thing.
“We should get going.” She plucked Rei’s half-filled glass from his hands, then got up to move to the kitchen and set both their drinks in the sink. Immediately an automated sterilizing system kicked in, leaving the cups empty and clean before she even stepped into the hall again. “Catcher, we’ve got to find the Quartermaster. Any interest in coming along?”
“Thanks, but I’ll have to pass.” The Saber gave Viv a mock salute from the couch as Rei pushed himself up across from him. “I need to finish unpacking anyway, and my mother will have my head if I don’t call her to let her know I made it. We live in the Luhman System, and she’s not keen on hole-drives.”
“Fair enough,” Viv said with a shrug, heading towards the door.
“Catch you at the ceremony?” Rei asked the boy as he stood up and made to follow her.
“Definitely,” Catcher smiled after them. “I might head over a little early, so I’ll save you guys a couple spots if I can.”
“Deal. See you then.”
With that, Rei followed Viv out of the suite, heading for the elevator again at the end of the hall. As the door closed behind them, they didn’t see Catcher’s grin slide slowly off his face, nor the blaze of his NOED as he pulled up the ISCM database. It only took a quick search to find what he was looking for, and the blond boy’s jaw dropped as he took in the data lining out before him.
“What the hell…?”
CHAPTER 12
“Name?” the Quartermaster behind the clean steel counter of the Institute stock depot—a major named Bashir Sattar, according to the plaque by his right elbow—asked without looking at Rei after he was called up. The officer was already typing into a pad suspended on a lift-desk floating beside him, drawing out a small, circular metal ball from a dispensary set up next to the table.
“Reidon Ward, sir,” Rei answered.
The major nodded in response, pulling up Rei’s profile, where he finally paused.
“Ah,” he muttered, as though recognizing the data. “Right. Uniform measurements, too. Dent did tell me there would be a new cadet looking to give me a headache this year.”
“A-a headache, sir?” Rei asked hesitantly. Sattar ignored the question, instead finally turning in his chair to face Rei and motioning for him to present his arm. “Let me see your CAD. I can pull up your current metrics and see if we have something in your actual size.”
Rei did as he was told, and the major picked up his pad from the lift-desk to hold it over Shido’s right band. It only took a moment, but apparently sifting through the stocks of first year uniforms was more intensive, so Rei instead chose to brave a glance over his shoulder at the line behind him.
As expected, almost every eye in the room was trained on his back, though a good number of the cadets looked away quickly as he caught them staring.
Having no reason to enter, Viv had been stopped at the depot door, where she’d assured him she would wait until his NOED upgrade and uniform corrections were finished. As a result, for the last 10 minutes Rei had had little distraction to deter him from feeling the stares while he waited in what had ended up being a long—if quick—line. More than a few first years turned out to need upgrades to their neuro-optics, and for a little while Rei had been able to focus on that, excited to consider what sort of specs the hardware had to have to require so many students to trade in their old ones. He’d tried thinking about all the kinds of tinkering he could do with the coding—assuming he managed to get into an ISCM encrypted device, of course—but by that point the repeated glances and low whispers from the others in line had become too much to ignore. Rei’s face had grown hot, but he’d kept his chin up, deliberately trying to meet the gaze of anyone brazen enough to eye him a little too long. It had happened before, when he’d been at away-tournaments with the Grandcrest
combat team.
But here, at Galens, among what generally seemed to be nothing but peerless physical specimens of the human condition, Rei got the sense he was going to have to brace himself for a whole lot more such scrutiny.
He shrugged the disgruntled feeling off. He’d grown more than a half-inch in 2 months, and gained a fair bit of weight to boot. He might never catch up to some of the monstrous examples of the boys in the line behind him, but he had no doubt it was only a matter of a year or so before he was tall enough not to attract any more awkward looks.
Couple that with the fact that his hip had barely bothered him on the walk to and from Kanes, and Rei suddenly felt like he could handle all the smirks and sniggers in the world.
“Got something,” Major Sattar announced at last, bringing Rei back to the task at hand. The man punched a few numbers into the pad that was now returned to the floating desk, and a few seconds later Rei saw a drone whirring towards them from the back of the cages behind the Quartermaster’s counter. Reaching them, it deposited a square box beside the officer, then flew off again.
“There’s a locker room in the back you can change into when we’re done,” the major said, now peering at Rei’s face as his NOED flared in his eyes. “Unilateral, huh? Is your module right or left?”
“Right, sir,” Rei answered, motioning the relevant side of his head.
“Pull your hardware.”
Reaching up, Rei brought the top of his index finger to his temple, feeling for the tiny patch of firmness in his otherwise malleable skin. Finding it, he pressed on the point for 5 full seconds, the standard security length to avoid accidental ejection.
There was the faintest click Rei knew only he could hear, and when he pulled his finger away a tiny circle of fused metal, boarding, and wires surgically glued to a layer of synthetic skin came away with it, about a third of an inch in diameter and half that deep. His frame hadn’t been live when he’d ejected the device, so nothing more that the military micro-clock set in the corner of his immediate vision vanished. Still, he felt somewhat vulnerable knowing he couldn’t pull up the neuro-optic even in the few minutes it would take to upgrade.
“On the counter, here.” Sattar tapped on a small cutout in the steel before him, and Rei complied, peeling the NOED off his finger and setting it down in the center of the square. The officer held the ball of metal he’d been holding onto over the device for a few seconds, watching his pad as he did, but as soon as the tablet flashed a notification he handed it to Rei. “All your logged data should be transferred, but check it thoroughly when you can. We’ll keep your old module for two weeks in case there are any issues.” As he spoke, the cutout retracted with the hardware, returning empty almost at once. “Are you comfortable installing it yourself?”
“Yes, sir,” Rei said too quickly, swallowing when the major gave him a look. No need for Galens to know how much he was hoping to play with their software scripting.
In the end, the Quartermaster just grunted.
“Locker room is in the back. Leave your current regulars hanging by the door. Someone will gather them later. Dismissed, cadet.”
Grabbing the box that contained his new uniform, Rei stepped smartly out of line, making for the hall that led to the rear of the building. It didn’t take him long to find the locker room, nor to pull himself out of his ill-fitting jacket and pants and hang them as indicated. He kept his original cap—for no reason other than nostalgia—but a couple minutes later was standing in front of a pane of smart-glass he’d requested a reflection out of.
Better, he thought to himself, feeling the fit fall around his wrists and ankles more cleanly. Satisfied, he opened the silver sphere by twisting it apart, fawning for a moment over the NOED disk that even an untrained eye could tell was probably a decade newer tech than the old neuro-optic Grandcrest had given him. Peeling it off carefully, he didn’t bother with the mirror, finding the empty space of the port in his right temple with well-practiced ease and installing the hardware with another tiny click.
Facing his reflection again, he smiled at the pale splotch of color that even before his eyes was transitioning to the exact gradient and texture of his actual skin.
*****
“This is wild! This is what you guys have had on me this entire time?! If I’d known that, I would have totally asked to borrow your NOED for our combat tournaments!”
Viv scoffed at Rei’s exclamation, walking side by side with him as they passed through what she’d just identified as the Institute hospital and the Tactical Studies Department. “And let you browse my feed history when I wasn’t paying attention? Not likely.”
Rei grinned, but otherwise ignored her, enjoying the crisp clarity of his new frame. It was his first time with a bilateral module, and he had to admit that access to both his optical nerves made the experience distinctly better. The interface responded faster, too, and he’d stopped them more than once to test how quickly he could bring up information on some particular part of the campus as they passed.
They’d been finishing their tour of the grounds for the last little while, taking their time and finding most of the major teaching departments along with a variety of other places of interest. Now, however, with the anticipated hour finally nearing, they were heading for the center of the campus, making for the massive grey-black walls that were visible from nearly half the windows and every foot of open ground in the Institute.
Approaching the Arena felt not unlike creeping towards some sleeping gargantuan, some dragon whose scales were made of darkened steel. It exuded a presence even from a quarter mile away, and with every moment Rei could feel his heart thrumming a little faster. So long. So long he’d waited for this. The projection from the third portion of their CAD Exam had been picture-accurate, he suspected, but he didn’t for a second think that that experience could compare to living and breathing such a place. There were scores of Arenas across most planets—more than a hundred on Astra-3 alone—but each was unique in its own fashion, designed in homage to the grand sporting and entertainment stadiums of an era of mankind long past. The Institute’s was no exception, and while most venues shared the ability to open their great ceilings to the sky for fair weather, Galens’ Arena did so by pressing a dozen massive triangular plates up and away from the roof. The result from the inside was astounding—Rei had seen it happen more than once on the feeds when the school had hosted the System tournament a few years back—but never before had he had the chance to take in the display from outside the building. A crown atop the slumbering beast, the points of the slats extended skyward, their flat surfaces catching the sunlight and gleaming like clean-cut jewels to tempt passersby into approaching.
Tempt them, and then consume them whole with the frenzy and violence and magnificence promised within.
Clearing the other campus buildings, the pale stone path beneath Rei and Viv’s feet turned to white marble fairly abruptly, cut into uneven rectangular designs that complimented the artistic chaos of the Arena’s walls. There were only two public entrances to the interior—to the west and east, along the broader lengths of the structure—and it was into the shadow of the former of these that the pair of them let themselves be swallowed. A semicircular cut 20 feet tall, it tapered like a gullet towards a set of wide stairs, at the base of which two staff in uniform were checking identification. Joining a scattered crowd of other arrivals, Rei and Viv were scanned, then waved through, and with electric anticipation Rei eagerly led the way, taking the steps two at a time.
Bursting out into the sun again, he caught his breath.
In an enormous oval amphitheater that could seat some 150,000 people, the stands extended to the north and south of him, then bent around the loop of the Arena’s ends only to come together on the opposite side. Far above, the curve of the black ceiling shaded most of the white, carved stone seats, the raised slats making it feel like Rei was looking up from inside the mouth of the dragon at its massive teeth. Dark pat
hs of black granite stairs cut crafted lines through the galleries, and—hovering suspended in the middle of it all—a trio of diamond-shaped apparatuses floated equidistant from each other along the length of the open air. These networked scanners were for the audience’s benefit, supplying a close-up of any part of any fight for the NOEDs of viewers not near enough to see the action in detail for themselves.
And there, 10 feet below the bottom edge of the lowest amphitheater walkway, the Arena floor’s silver lines gleamed against the black projection plating they were set into.
If Rei had been confident enough in his specs, he might at that moment have vaulted the rail he’d at some point found himself leaning over, like an elated child trying his best to get close to the captive animals in a zoo. He took in the shining base of the combat fields, tracing with his eyes the great length of the Wargames area, then the pair of smaller Team Battle zones, followed by the four Dueling fields. He would have gone looking for a way down regardless, perhaps, if Viv hadn't taken him by the sleeve of his uniform with a sigh, muttering about “fanboys” again as she led him to the right, towards the south end of the Arena stands. He might have protested, but he saw then the large projection that had been cast over the loop in the stands she was pulling him towards, the red griffin on grey, just like the bands they had about their arms.
Against a stage that could hold tens of thousands of spectators, the meager collection of Galens’ new cadets seemed almost disappointing. They had gathered from the lowest point in the seating upward, finding places in the very middle section of the south loop as several more uniformed officers directed the incomers, but despite this building wedge of bodies—gold against black interspersed with a vibrant array of colored hair under caps—the showing was sad. As they neared, though, Rei considered that this was likely by design.
It impressed on the gathered students the weight of the curriculum they were about to take, and the eyes of the world they might—just might—one day be taking on.
Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1) Page 16