Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1)

by Bryce O'Connor

  “And you want to eke out everything you can, while you can,” the Lasher summarized.

  “Everything, yeah,” Rei echoed in agreement.

  The black-and-red helmet tilted into a brief nod again. “Then get back to your starting ring. You’ve got one more hour of my time, Ward. Make it count.”

  *****

  Two times. In most of that last hour, Rei only allowed himself to be taken down a mere two times, and then only because exhaustion started to truly weigh at him. He was grateful, by that point, for the rest the Lasher had forced him to take. He saw again his own bullheadedness, his own foolish drive to run himself into the ground. As it was his arms and legs were screaming with every motion, every block and attack and step and dodge. Rei grit his teeth through it, unwilling to be brought down now, to fall in the final stretch. He didn’t just want C4, anymore. He’d reached that, he was sure. 4 hours of live combat with Christopher Lennon would have put him over that edge and then some. But he wanted more, now. Rei was reminded of that every time he got just a little closer to putting a scratch into Ouroboros’ dark armor, fighting there in the Abandoned Depot they were steadily destroying around them. He wanted what “the Lasher” had. He wanted what the most terrifying User he’d ever stepped onto the field with wielded. He wanted that, and more.

  Then again, that was why Shido had been given to him, hadn’t it?

  Because he’d always wanted that.

  In a blur that melted black with red the chain-sword in Lennon’s right snapped at Rei’s face. He sprung into a half-backflip to avoid the blow, pulling his legs off the ground in time to keep from having both ankles severed by a lower cut by the offending weapon’s twin. Ignoring the protest of his elbows and shoulders, Rei accepted the weight of his body on his hands and twisted face-down, then shoved off again to drive both feet at Lennon’s head. The third year dodged casually, having accelerated six times now, his speed once more no longer anything Rei had a chance of beating.

  Didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

  With a whipping of his arms and torso Rei turned the arching drop kick into a drill-like whirl of elbows and razored claws as he passed the Lasher. Again the blows were avoided with almost-serpentine fluidity, but Rei landed in a crouch on his opponent’s far side even as he drove a fist into the already-broken cement beside him, sending an eruption of stone and dust into Lennon’s face, who let the shrapnel pelt off his reactive shielding with a hundred tiny ripples of distortion, like rain drops on the surface of a still lake. Rei lanced forward all the same, hoping to have at least earned himself enough of a distraction to close the distance between the two of them.

  Once again, however, he couldn’t get close enough.

  PING!

  His lead-through ricocheted clean off the roiling shield of steel and vysetrium that came into being in a 2-foot radius around Lennon’s body, the whipping chain-swords as absolute as a wall to Rei at the rate they were moving. With a curse he lunged sideways, hoping to get around his opponent’s back, but the third year stepped in synch with him so that it felt less like he was running and more like the room was merely spinning about the two of them while they stood in place. There was a flash of shifting light in the dervish of sharpened metal, and Rei planted with a crunch of cracking cement underfoot, stopping himself just in time to keep from getting skewered by the chain-sword that broke formation to lance outwards, straight as a spear, exactly where he would have been had he kept moving. Seeing a chance with half of Ouroboros’ weaponry suddenly separate from the whirling defensive barrier, Rei didn’t hesitate, driving an arm into the storm of razored steel.

  His claws were still 6 inches from Lennon’s face when the limb got caught in the maelstrom, black steel cleaving through Shido’s plating into flesh and bone just above his elbow, wrenching it up and back as the pain of the wound tore into Rei’s shoulder, neck, and chest.

  Then Ouroboros exploded outward, the paired weapons broadening in their circling sweeps just wide enough to catch Rei a dozen different ways from as many direction.

  When he fell, this time, it was straight back, and even through the agony of the defeat Rei knew that—had the Lasher’s blades been anything but phantom-called—he would have struck the ground to scatter into a hundred bloody pieces over the broken mess of the field.

  “Fatal Damage Accrued,” the Arena announced. “Winner: Christopher Lennon.”

  Twenty, Rei thought to himself as the pain faded little by little from what parts of his shoulders, chest, and head he could still feel at all. It seemed an appropriate number, somehow. 4 hours. Twenty deaths.

  “All right, that’s enough.”

  Lennon’s voice was clear as he spoke, and when Rei managed to regain adequate control of the muscles of his neck to lift his head from the ground, he found the A-Ranker approaching him once again in his combat suit, Ouroboros having returned to its black-and-grey bands around his wrists, gleaming with the wicked red of their vysetrium jewels.

  “That’s time, Ward.” The Lasher’s assertion was almost gentle, like he was worried Rei wouldn’t be able to accept the fact that they practically hadn’t left their training chamber for 16 hours, now. “That’s enough.”

  Rei, though, had no words left to fight with. He was so tired he was pretty sure he might have been able to fall asleep right then and there once again, atop the shattered remnants of what had been a clean concrete floor. He had nothing left, no energy remaining to protest with as he looked to the corner of his vision to see the time there.

  2145.

  He almost smiled. Lennon had let him fight to the very last. At this rate, he’d be lucky to make it back to Kanes before curfew.

  It only added to the gratitude.

  “Thank you,” he managed to wheeze out, looking up at the ceiling of the Abandoned Depot that was still projected above them. “For this. For everything. I know you didn’t have to.”

  Lennon’s face appeared once more above him, then, framed against the light of the circular opening overhead like a ringing halo. “Maybe not, but I get the feeling it will be worth it, one day.”

  “How so?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” The third years lips were a tight, flat line, and his icy eyes drifted down to Shido’s black-and-blue over the white underlayer. “So… Now what? We just wait?”

  “Think so,” Rei said with a huffing laugh, wincing when the action lanced a spasm of pain through his abused torso. When the ache of it subsided, he wheezed out one word to mark a true end to the fight.

  “Recall.”

  His arms and legs thumped in unison to the scarred cement as his Device retracted back into its rings, leaving him feeling somewhat naked after having kept it live for so long. Following his lead, Lennon’s NOED flared briefly, and the Depot started to depixilate from the top down, the wall and support beams fading into nothing, revealing the stark-white of the training chamber ceiling once again, accented with its bright lines of solar lights. After a few seconds Rei felt the ground, too, dematerialize, and then he was settling down to the steel of the projection plating. It felt good, soothing and cool.

  And yet it did nothing to quiet his anticipation.

  His heart was refusing to calm. He tried breathing slowly, tried steadying himself as he lay there, not positive if he wasn’t capable of sitting up or just unwilling. Nothing helped, and the lingering thrum of his pulse in his chest started to feel unpleasant. He was reminded of the moments before his larger surgeries, the seconds of shaking fear looking up into the light while doctors he didn’t know leaned over him to place the mask about his face. In silence he lay with that, not sure of what to expect.

  And then, just as Lennon started opening his mouth to ask if anything had happened, Rei’s frame lit up with activity.

  He read the scrolling text as it came, devouring the lines of script hungrily. His moment of unpleasant memory was swept away as he took in the data, elation sweeping through him with every
character. Strength, up. Endurance, up. Speed, Cognition, Defense, Offense. All up. His eyes continued to trace the information, growing wider and wider.

  Until, that is, he reached the final lines of the notification, where a new alert was writing itself into being.

  For a long, long time Rei could only stare, not comprehending. Whether due to fatigue or just genuine shock, his mind seemed to be refusing to understand, refusing to process. Slowly, still rereading those final sentences, Rei at last brought himself up to sit, not seeing anything but the alert before him.

  “Rei, what is it?”

  Rei was so engrossed, he didn’t notice Lennon had once again slipped into using his first name. The third year had squatted down beside him, elbows on his knees, and if he’d had any attention for it Rei might have been fascinated at the genuine excitement that lit up the normally placid face.

  As it was, there wasn’t an ounce of focus for anything else, in that moment.

  “I-I…” he started to try to explain, but found himself unable to manage it. “I can’t… I don’t…”

  “Did you make it? C4? Did you evolve?”

  Rei struggled to register the questions, still reeling. Eventually he managed to nod, and would later regret missing the moment of celebration on his behalf that was Christopher Lennon giving the air the smallest of fist-pumps.

  “And?” the third year pressed immediately following this. “What else? You look like your CAD just jumped you straight to King-Class!”

  Rei shook his head slowly, still staring.

  After a few more seconds of shocked silence, however, he just barely got the words out.

  “New Ability Assigned…” he read out loud.

  “Yes!”

  The Lasher’s exclamation, so strangely unlike his usual composure, was at last enough to jolt Rei out of some of his stunned paralysis. He blinked and looked around unsteadily to find the A-Ranker peering at his eyes with a broad grin, like he was trying to read the miniscule script that would have been written backwards for him across Rei’s iris.

  “I told you. I told you!” He sounded ecstatic, about as excited for Rei as Rei supposed he should have been feeling for himself. “What is it? Arsenal Shift?! Tell me it’s Arsenal Shift!”

  For a little longer, Rei could only stare at Lennon, once again unsure of how to answer.

  In the end, he decided his astonishment couldn’t be expressed in words, and so he did the only thing left to him.

  With a few slow eye commands Rei took a screenshot of the notification. He had the sense to crop the image down to just the lowest lines, those announcing the upgrade to C4 and evolution, along with the source of his disbelief. With a shaky swipe of one hand, he sent it over, and Lennon blinked as the picture popped onto his frame, his face lighting up once he realized what it was. Immediately he started reading, tracing the script swiftly.

  And then he, too, reached the bottom lines, and the widening of his blue eyes told Rei he wouldn’t get the answer he wanted even as he asked the question.

  “Lennon… What the hell is that?”

  It took a moment for the third year to respond, the astonishment marring his usually-steady expression. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse with shock.

  “No idea. But I get the feeling you’ll be needing to talk to your friend Catchwick again before Tuesday…”

  CHAPTER 55

  Sol System – Earth – Sector 1

  “As far as we are from the front lines, it had been a long, long time since anything riled up the top echelons of Earth’s highest officers with half that amount of excitement and—to a certain extent—fear…”

  - General Shira Abel

  Private Journals

  In the years to come, Sergeant Major Cassidy Maran would wonder if she’d been blessed or cursed by the MIND to have been on duty that evening.

  It was the graveyard shift, and even Central Command’s main hub—usually a bustling hive of activity any time other than the two or three hours on either side of midnight—was empty and dead. Usually Cassidy didn’t mind this, as it allowed her to catch up on work she might otherwise have neglected. The shift was a formality more than anything anyway, an assurance that a pair of eyes were on the outputs of the massive super computers that oversaw the million different facets of the ISCM’s hundreds of branches across seven systems and the front lines beyond Sirius. She was a User—if a lowly C9—but this was by tradition more than anything else. There wasn’t a force in the universe that would have tried fighting their way through the massive complex that was Central’s main hub to reach where she sat now, amid a hundred flickering screens and dim lights which lined the multi-level seating of the large room.

  Still, it was the very fact that she was a User that would have Cassidy waking up some of the most important officers in the world that night.

  Blowing on her second mug of coffee of the evening, Cassidy was returning to her seat of choice when it happened. Intent as she was to file some paperwork for the warrant officer promotion she’d be angling towards for some months, now, she almost missed the blinking orange in a far section of the darkened room, the illumination that occurred when one of the monitors on the desks came alive to displaying a non-emergency high-priority notification. Catching sight of the light, though, Cassidy frowned and started towards it, squinting at the great letters in bronze that labeled the section against the shadowed white wall along the top of the three-tiered rows.

  Astra.

  That put a little pep in Cassidy’s step, though she was careful not to spill her coffee as she hurried over.

  While not as consistent about it as the Sol System itself, the Astra System was well known for producing a plethora of solid Users for the ISCM every year. It was small wonder, of course, with schools like the Galens Institute and Ellison Academy within its orbit. It was for this reason that Cassidy approached the screen in question with some expectancy, even ducking under the great hanging projection devices in the center of the room as opposed to going around them.

  Despite the screens all being clear smart-glass, they still only displayed one way in order to keep information limited to the intended recipient. This forced Cassidy to climb the half-dozen steps to the higher row, then slip along behind the tucked-in chairs to the station in question. Reaching it, she leaned down with interest to read the few short lines of bright blue text, boxed in a large, blinking orange frame, her eye falling first on the bold words that topped the alert.

  “Priority Case,” she muttered to herself. “Ward, Reidon. C4.”

  Then her gaze dropped to the rest of the notification, and Cassidy didn’t even notice as her mug of coffee slipped from her hand to shatter with a splash of hot liquid across the desk and screen.

  She was gone in an instant, NOED already live to call the Central directory. She was halfway to the door of the room when the line picked up.

  “Operator,” a young man’s voice on the other side answered. “State your identification and—”

  “Sergeant Major Maran!” Cassidy was practically yelling as she took the steps up to the exit two at a time. It opened for her as she crested the stairs. “ID: Charlie-Charlie-Echo-77-89-0! I need you to wake up General Shira Abel! Now!”

  She was out, then, the entrance closing behind her silently. As the doors to the central hub sealed shut, the automatic lights of the room dimmed at once, plunging the space into near total darkness.

  Below the large bronze letters of the Astra observations section, though, the single screen still lit up with bright blue text inside the blinking orange alert frame.

  Priority Case: Ward, Reidon. C4.

  User-Unique Ability Assigned.

  CHAPTER 56

  “Do not be afraid; our fate

  Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”

  - Inferno

  Dante Alighieri

  From her seated place in the Arena stands beside Viv and Catcher, Aria only pretend
ed to watch Jack Benaly prove himself once more as a terror on the field. She hadn’t even registered who his opponent was, and in the state she was in had neither the interest nor the attention to spare to peer down and figure it out.

  She, like Viv on her left, was waiting for the next match to start with disquiet trepidation.

  It had been a bizarre last 36 hours, to say the least. All of Sunday she’d been on pins and needles, trying and failing to study between meals and the extra training the three of them had still put themselves through, even going to West Center for once to avoid the temptation to look in on how Rei’s day with Lennon was going in East. As morning turned into afternoon, then into evening, they’d all watched Rei’s profile on the ISCM database like hawks, waiting and hoping. It had been very nearly 2200 at night, approaching curfew, when they saw his CAD Rank tick up to C4, and the three of them had whooped with victory before gathering in the living area of Suite 304, ready to celebrate as soon as he got back.

  When Rei did, though, it was bearing an expression akin to having been struck by lightning.

  That’s when things had started to get worrisome.

  Hardly managing to offer Aria and Viv a smile, Rei had pulled Catcher into his room, where the two boys had stayed locked up for a good 20 minutes before the blond Saber stepped out again looking pale. He’d explained to the girls that Rei was beyond exhausted, and was sorry he couldn’t say good night, which had stung, but been understandable. The next morning, however, neither of the boys had joined them for breakfast, with Rei also conspicuously absent from early classes. Not one of their instructors, though, had so much as blinked at his nonattendance, which had Aria suspecting something big was going on. Viv had been in agreement, and they’d messaged him, together and separately. When they received no answer, they did the same to Catcher, who replied only that everything was fine, and they would both understand soon enough.