“E5!”
A few more bites, a little extra weight.
E6 was called, then 7, then 8, then 9. The pain was real now, a constant, undulating stabbing that cycled haphazardly around Rei’s limbs, body, and head. He tolerated it, setting it aside with well-practiced effort. It was the heaviness, now, that started to concern him. He was already far beyond his own Ranking, and his back was starting to ache something awful. He worked on standing up straight, realizing as he did that his eyes had been closed for some time. Opening them, he let out a shuddering breath as he blinked away the brightness of the subbasement lights.
That was when he noticed Valera Dent.
He hadn’t heard the captain arrive, hadn’t heard her make her way through their testing rings to join Bretz in the center of the field. She hadn’t made herself known to them since the beginning of the assessments, in fact, but the woman stood now with her arms crossed, as appeared to be her fashion.
Stood, and watched Rei unblinkingly.
It took him aback, having not expected the Iron Bishop’s attendance, much less her attention. He met her gaze unsteadily, suddenly feeling his body trembling.
“D0!”
The warrant officer’s shout was accompanied by a new wave of pain, and Rei could certainly feel it now. The constant tabbing at his skin by the “insects” had been replaced by a steady, pulsing burn, like acid splashed against his bare body. His straightening had helped with the weight, but he felt like he could sense his spine compressing.
“D1!”
With a keen of agony, Gisham collapsed on his left, knees slamming to the projected floor under the added pull of the artificial gravity. At once the rings around her blinked out, and she stayed in that kneeling position, trembling under what Rei hoped was the ghost of the test’s sensation.
Bretz hurried over to her, crouching down beside the girl to put a steadying hand on her shoulder.
“Good effort, cadet,” Rei heard the man say. “Take a rest, and gather yourself. That was almost to your Rank. You’ve got two more tries.”
Two more tries.
It registered, then. Not only the fact that Rei had two more attempts—completely forgotten in the single-minded focus to overcome the pain and pressure he was already feeling—but also Valera Dent’s gaze.
The intent, expectant gaze that had only barely flinched away from him with Gisham’s fall.
“S-Sir!” Rei struggled to speak, the movement redoubling the pain around his jaw, his tongue moving awkwardly in his mouth under the restraint of the added gravity.
At his left, Bretz turned to him in surprise. Speaking during the assessment must not have been a common thing.
“I’d l-like to end my… end my a-attempt, sir,” Rei ground out.
The warrant officer frowned, hesitating. Then, with a flash of his NOED, the red rings around Rei’s feet vanished with a blink.
There was an instant, an odd breath where Rei felt like he was floating. He felt so light he might have been lifting off the field, or been suspended in the depths of an ocean. Steadily his body adapted to standard gravity, though, and he came back to himself, finding his feet and discovering relief as his mind registered the pain having gone.
“I’d like to say that was an excellent first go Ward—seven ranks higher than the average E4—but I have to admit disappointment at the end.” Having made sure Gisham was all right, Bretz had stood to approach him. “If you had the strength to ask for the attempt to end, I like to think you had another couple levels in you.”
Rei had to work hard to keep his lips tight as he offered the man a shaky salute. “Yes, sir. I’ll do better by the end of the exam, sir.”
Bretz eyed him for a moment, clearly having detected something amiss in his answer.
Then, with a grunt, he turned back towards the center of the field, waving Rei down as he walked away. “Take a rest. Try to push yourself a bit more on the next one.”
Rei didn’t answer, not wanting to lie. Instead, he tried to catch Valera Dent’s eye again as he sat down, but the captain had looked away from him once he’d abandoned his first try.
He didn’t miss the hint of a smile on her synthetic lips, however.
Fortunately the others weren’t long in falling. Sense actually dropped next, at D3, with Warren at D5 and Emble reaching an impressive D7. Bretz congratulated them all, then said there would be a 3-minute reprieve before the start of the next attempt. Rei thought he could hear Gisham mumbling profanity under her breath from his left, but he ignored her, focusing instead on steeling himself for a scathing lecture.
He didn’t think their instructor was going to like the stunt he pulled next.
“Second attempt, cadets!” the warrant officer shouted as their break came to an end, motioning for all of them to get to their feet. “Thirty seconds! Up you come!”
Captain Dent still hadn’t left, keeping to her spot in the center of the ring as she observed in silence aside from the occasional quiet question or comment to Bretz. As Rei stood up, he was sure he could feel the woman’s eyes on him, and he hoped against hope he wasn’t about to make a complete idiot of himself. He found his place in the middle of the two rings that had reappeared beneath him, and waited.
At last the countdown appeared.
5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
The moment it hit 0, as the tingling sensation crawled up his legs, Rei took a knee.
“Ward!” Bretz bellowed, seeing him end the attempt within moments of it beginning and starting towards him in anger. “What in the MIND’s name do you think—?!”
“Leave him, Bretz.”
The warrant officer stopped short at Valera Dent’s steady order.
“Ma’am!” he tried to start arguing, looking around at her still red in the face. “He reached D1 on his first try! If he had it in him he could—!”
“Leave him,” the captain repeated, and again her eyes were on Rei. The smile was gone, now, but the expectation had not left her gaze. If anything, it had intensified, almost as though in warning.
I see you, those eyes said. I see what you are doing. Don’t screw it up.
Silently, Rei promised himself he wouldn’t.
Time, it transpired, passes much quicker when one isn’t being actively tormented by invisible forces, and so the 10 minutes the others took ticked by steadily as Rei observed his groupmates. Again the other four reached the D-Rank together, with Gisham making it to D2 this time before falling. Sense had a similar improvement of achieving D4, while Warren fell at D5 again and Emble only managed D6 on his second attempt. It was this last failing that solidified Rei’s resolve, that had him sure he had made the right decision. The test pushed at the body and mind, and while sometimes that led to progress, it could just as well lead to exhaustion. Indeed, Emble looked almost grey as he fell, Bretz hurrying over to the cadet as he shouted that they would get another break. Rei bet himself Emble would fail in the early Ds, maybe even the high Es. The boy had given it his all—reaching a fair bit higher than his rank—but now he was spent.
Rei, on the other hand, was not, and he knew exactly what to expect this time.
“Third attempt,” the warrant officer called 3 minutes later. Captain Dent still hadn’t moved, and she wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that her attention was fixed wholeheartedly on Rei. He didn’t know what he had done to earn such study, but he welcomed it. In the CAD-Assignment Exam, he had wanted to fight, had wanted to show that he was more than his body told any bearing witness that it was limited to.
Now the Iron Bishop was watching, and his opportunity had come.
The countdown started, ticked away, and reached zero.
Rei closed his eyes as the prickling sensation crawled up his body. He focused, drowning everything else, trying desperately even to tune out the chief warrant officer’s declarations of the climbing ranks. He felt more than heard the group pass steadily through the Fs, then into the Es, experiencin
g the bite as they moved to E4. Little by little the pain intensified, but he welcomed it, using it as a tool to pull away from the rest of the world and focus only on the next minute, the next moment. Distraction managed to get through only when he heard Elber fall with a cry, and knew Gisham would be next. The girl failed not long after, and by then the sheer effort of standing up had Rei struggling to breath. His eyes still shut tight, he clenched his jaw as he held himself as erect as he could. Though the field beneath him was as solid as concrete, he felt like the projection was going to crack under the downward pressure of his bare feet. And the pain. The pain. The bites had become the burn, and the burn had become an inferno. It ripped at him, clawing at his head and face and body and limbs. He felt like his skin was trying to peel itself away, and the escalation of the test presented itself as a growing edge of warning red and black in the corners of his vision.
No, he told himself every time this threat of unconsciousness took him. Not yet. Not. Yet.
A particularly excruciating leap in the test’s intensity almost had his knees buckling, and from the darkness of his mind—the deep, deep place he had long since learned to bury himself in when the agony of his body was too much—Rei knew that he was having trouble breathing. That was fine. That was fine, he told himself. He would pass out, and the pain would end. There had been times when the black of nothingness had been his only reprieve, in the days before his larger surgeries had freed his spine or neck or arms or legs. It was nothing. This he could do. This he could hold.
And then, just as he felt consciousness slipping away, the pain was gone.
Again Rei found himself floating, but the surprise of it brought him far higher this time as his eyes snapped open. He was weightless, still standing on the ground, and yet flying high above every head. For several seconds this time, the sensation lingered.
And then he collapsed.
“I-I wasn’t done,” he struggled to say, fighting to lift his head as he found himself on all fours. “I wasn’t done!”
The click of leather boots answered him before anything else, stopping just as Rei managed to look up. Valera Dent was standing before him, staring down at him with an air of such distinct victory, there was no mistaking it this time.
After a moment, she knelt down, lowering herself closer to his shivering height, and reached for his face.
“I wasn’t done,” Rei repeated with a snarl, shrinking away from her, furious that his opportunity to prove himself had been snatched from him. “I hadn’t fallen.”
The captain ignored him, and the ache and fatigue of muscles held tense for too long prevented him from moving away in time to keep her from touching him. He felt her fingers slide along the back line of his jaw, under his ear.
Then she brought them back for him to see the blood.
“You did enough, cadet,” she said quietly, her NOED flashing in her eyes. From somewhere the buzz of a drone zipping towards them at full speed could be made out, and Rei noticed abruptly that all sound had ceased in the Arena. “Any longer, and I would have had to explain to Lieutenant Colonel Mayd why the same first year ended up out cold in his care two days in a row. That—” she glanced over Rei’s back “—and the screaming was distracting your classmates.”
Rei’s breath caught in his throat just as a medical drone dropped in to bob in the air at Dent’s left, blue and red lights flashing silently across its forward plating.
He’d been screaming?
Distantly Rei watched the drone trail the captain’s reddened fingers with an ion scrub, cleaning and sterilizing her skin in one go as the blood was atomized into dust. He didn’t even blink as it turned in the air to do the same to his face, then scanned his head at some input from Dent’s neuro-optic. It zipped around the side of his bleeding for a moment, and with a zap Rei felt a small needle of discomfort lance through his jaw inside his ear.
He barely registered it.
“No significant concerns noted,” the woman told him, dismissing the drone with a final command before her eyes returned to their usual brown. “A ruptured vessel from spiking blood pressure in. You stopped breathing for a bit at the end there. Probably what did it. It’s cauterized now, so you should be fine, but have Cadet Arada take you to the hospital if you suffer any headaches or additional bleeding tonight.”
Rei nodded numbly, finally managing to ease himself back onto his heels. His arms shook under his weight, and his legs were happy to give out.
“How…?” he started, still processing. He’d been screaming? “H-how far did I get?”
The captain smiled at him.
“I’ll let Chief Warrant Officer Bretz tell you that. He seemed hard-pressed not to join in the cheering from your groupmates. I would hate to deprive him the satisfaction.”
Another surprise.
“They were… cheering?”
Dent chuckled, watching him a moment more.
“Good job, cadet. I’m glad to find you don’t disappoint.”
And then, with a brush of her uniform as she got to her feet, the Iron Bishop was gone, leaving Rei to watch his sub-instructor marching towards him with a manic sort of pride gleaming in the man’s eyes.
*****
“C2? C2?! No way…”
They were back in the locker room, the parameter testing having wrapped up some 15 minutes after Rei’s completion of the third assessment, with Dent dismissing them after a brief congratulations and encouragement to continue pushing themselves to ever greater heights. Viv was all worried glances until after they’d rinsed off and dried themselves with towels dispensed automatically at the mouth of the men and women’s shower chambers. Now that they’d returned to their quiet aisle along the north wall of the locker room, though, she was gaping at Rei with her mouth hanging open, having just been explained what his apparent screaming—confirmed by the odd looks he’d gotten the whole way out of the gym, down the subbasement hall, and even into the showers—had been about.
“Way.” It was Sense who assured her from where he was pulling on his uniform. After Rei had recovered enough to stand and walk on his own—or with a little subtle help—the Brawler had collected his things from his own locker to join them in the back aisle. “Our instructor about blew a gasket, in a good way. He kept his cool, but I’m almost sure he would have hugged Rei if there’d been no one looking.”
Viv eyed the bald boy suspiciously. She clearly hadn’t forgiven him his involvement in the exchange with Leron that morning, even after Rei had assured her quietly the cadet was good in his book. “I would freakin’ hope so. I heard Laurent only made it to C1. One of his Brawlers beating out the class C-Ranker… Dude’s going to be a celebrity in the officer’s mess hall, tonight.”
“I’m not much clear on how besting her in one test is me ‘beating out’ Laurent,” Rei grumbled, pulling his boots on with some difficulty given his fingers didn’t seem to want to work properly. “Let’s not forget she turned me into a breathing shish kebab about 24 hours ago…”
He hid a smile from Viv, though. It had been amusing to see Bretz—up to that point so rigid and stoic—working hard to keep a tempered expression as he clapped Rei on both shoulders and informed him of how far he’d gone. The looks of awe on the groups’ faces hadn’t hurt either, with even Warren having taken him in with something of a little more substance than uninterest, for once.
“But seriously, dude… Are you made of iron? That was insane…”
Sense had finished buttoning up his uniform, and was now standing with the cap in hand, watching Rei intently. Viv started to answer, but Rei waved her down.
“It’s okay, Viv. Not like I can pretend I have a princess-perfect completion forever.” He looked back to Sense, who seemed suddenly nervous.
“If you don’t want to explain—”
“It’s okay,” Rei repeated with a sigh. Finished with his boots, he stood up to pull his jacket from his locker. “I’ve been… sick, man. For a pretty long ti
me.”
Sense’s eyebrows would have disappeared under his hairline if he’d had one, but he let Rei continue.
“A disease. Fibrodysplasia oss—” Rei cut himself off with a shake of his head. “It’s not important. Long story short, my soft tissue doesn’t want to stay soft. I’ve got—or had, hopefully—bone growing in my joints, along with pretty much everywhere else.” He slid one arm into the jacket, then the other, wondering if his legs would stop shaking by the time they got back to Kanes. “My… uh… beauty marks—” he held up a hand for Sense to take in the scars along the fingers and wrist as he grabbed his cap with the other “—are the result of surgery. A lot of surgery. Between recovering from those and the condition itself, well…”
“Most of that test probably felt like a light tickle,” Viv finished for him, herself lagging behind as she only just buttoned up her slacks, having been distracted up until then by Rei’s parameter results.
“Damn…” Sense muttered quietly, taking Rei in with a new kind of respect—and possibly just the hint of commiseration. “Not to harp on a touchy subject, but… I’m assuming that’s got something to do with your size, too?”
“Yeah,” Rei confirmed before Viv could snarl anything. It was all going to get out there one way or the other, and he had a feeling Sense wasn’t about to go around disparaging him with what he was finding out. “Damaged growth plates from repeated surgeries. Even the ones that didn’t get screwed up on their own over time were deliberately adjusted so I wouldn’t grow up lopsided.” Pulling the cap over his hair and closing his locker, he gave Sense a crooked smile. “Would have been something to walk around with one leg 4 inches longer than the other, though.”
“Ha,” the Brawler managed grimly, still looking at Rei with that same odd appreciation. “You’ve had it rough, man…”
Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1) Page 29