by Aer-ki Jyr
“Easy, blue eyes. Don’t want you passing out on me.”
“Not going to happen. I can sense my energy level extremely well. I know where I’m at and how much more I’ve got.”
“How about muscle strength?”
“I’ve got good recharge in Super Saiyan mode, but no power boost. Only speed.”
“So that’s why you hit like a girl,” he said, raising a hand and taunting her with two fingers gesturing towards him.
“Try and make me break a sweat…please,” Lara said, then dove at him with a flurry of almost invisible blows.
Borelli watched Lara’s stats while she was sparring with Aaron, seeing her Essence spike and diminish in an erratic pattern, but this was far more swings than she had ever displayed before. It was like the presence of the trailblazer was provoking a unique reaction, and he almost kicked himself for not having tried this sooner. Lara had insisted on sparing only with machines, because other Archons couldn’t keep up with her anymore, but the machines were predictable because they were set to complete basic moves at high speed with zero fatigue. They didn’t offer unpredictability the way a live opponent did.
The master medtech watched eagerly, trying to isolate when the spikes were occurring and why…then it hit him. It clear as could be once the thought occurred, and he immediately realized why it hadn’t before. He was a medtech, and biology was what he lived and breathed. He knew the Core existed and it drove the body and mind like a pilot in a dropship, but until this recent research he’d never dealt with the Core having any other effects, for it was irritatingly invisible as far as science was concerned.
Which was why he had missed this all along. Mostly because Lara was doing rudimentary, frankly boring training that didn’t require adaptation from her, just repetition. Now she had to adapt to Aaron as he adapted to her, and the reason for her Essence spikes was now obvious, for it was occurring when she was caught off guard and reacted…but only when she reacted. When she just balled up and took the hit nothing happened, but when she found a way to counteract him in the blink of an eye her stats surged for a brief moment, then diminished back into the ‘normal’ erraticness.
Instinct. It wasn’t something that was scientifically calculable, but it was something that Borelli was familiar with from his own training. A momentary spark of knowledge that seemingly comes out of nowhere when one has to react with no time to think. Most people simply fail, but every now and then one has a spark of instinct and does something seemingly magical before they even realize what they’re doing.
It had happened to him a few times during his life, and it had happened so fast it felt like it was just his imagination, but there had been one time when a friend had thrown a sensor rod across a medbay to another person. Maybe he’d signaled for it with a hand gesture, because nobody had said anything, and it had passed so close to Borelli that he had flinched…but instead of flinching away, his hand had shot up and he’d caught it before he realized what he was doing. The others had seen it and made quite a big deal out of his reflexes from that day on, so he knew that time it wasn’t his imagination.
It had been instinct, whatever that was. It didn’t calculate biologically, but Borelli was seeing it play out here and now, and each time Lara successfully reacted in an unanticipated way to something Aaron did, her stats would spike for a few seconds.
“So dumb. So dumb,” he said, referencing himself. “It’s the Core. Of course it’s not going to be linked to biology. Focus on personality and mentality. Not biology.”
“No. Focus on badass. That’s what Lara had to be to get here, and that’s probably why it’s spiking. I just wish I had a way to define ‘badass’ in a scientific sense. But if this is a training effect, then I’m not the one to handle it. The Archons are…or not. They’re on the inside, so maybe they’re not as well suited to this as the one who trained them. I don’t need more medtechs, I need a Head Trainer. The Head Trainer, if he’s willing,” Borelli said, abandoning his active monitoring of Lara and knowing that the computer would record everything for him to nitpick later. Right now he had to send a message to Davis and ask him if he would reassign the reclusive Wilson to the project, for if he asked himself the legend would probably turn him down.
Maybe not, if it involved the Archons, but better to have it come from the Director regardless. Borelli was now sure that he was in over his head here, and while he would assist as needed, he got the feeling that the answer to this riddle wasn’t going to be solved by science, but rather by ‘piloting’ experience, of which he had very little compared to the Archons and the other upper echelons in the lifeblood of Star Force…it’s training.
10
October 12, 4941
Jepiker System (Deu Region)
Forge
When Lara left the medbay training facility on Vis it had been uncomfortable, for the Saiyan Archon had essentially been reborn there. Her life before that medical gauntlet she’d had to run was a hazy memory, but once she had started to travel through space enroute to the new Archon planet things changed. Her ‘home’ on Vis, she realized, wasn’t that. She had just been hammered so hard she’d forgotten a lot about her life and now she was getting a wakeup call as the dropship took her off the Warship-class starship that had been her ride to get to Forge.
Lara hadn’t been paying attention to updates from outside during her transformation, and even when she could have been later she’d never bothered. It wasn’t until Vortison told her that she would have to leave to continue her tuning did Lara start to get curious as to what was going on out here…and the first thing that she discovered was that Davis had given Wilson an entire star system to renovate as an Archon/Maverick training center. And not just for the recruits, but for all of them at the varying levels of development they currently were, including her.
Morelli had already come here and talked to Wilson before Lara had got the summons from him ordering her here. And that’s how he had put it too. It was strange how she automatically did what he said, despite the fact that she outranked him and almost everyone else in the empire, but did she really? Wilson was the one who had made her an Archon, and ever since basic training she and the others had held him in the highest esteem.
And now he was going to help her master her new powers. It was going to be like back in basic all over again, except without peers. Yeah, that part was going to be weird, but with Wilson she wouldn’t have to worry about crafting her own workouts. Only surviving his.
But this place, as it turned out, was a lot more than a training center. There were five Clans here…Sangheili, Rwby, Apex, Croft, and Neon Squirrel…that served as system defense and resource manufacturing, then there was an army of Wilson’s training staff that were still busy adding new challenge courses, overseeing quartary construction, developing equipment for new races, and a million other things.
But there was no one else here, in the entire star system. The inhabitants of the third planet had been moved out entirely and relocated to one that better suited the Viroli. They preferred a dry climate and only small patches of that world had qualified. Now they had one big dust ball some 839 lightyears away where a Monarch was shaping them into what would one day be a sub-faction focusing on aerial combat that was natural for the winged Viroli.
Now though, there wasn’t a single one left on any of the 9 worlds or 14 moons. All those here were the elite of the elite of the elite, for the Clans had competed for the 5 guardian slots quite fiercely, and being posted here had quickly become almost a sacred duty as they helped to build the centralized birthplace of the Archons and Mavericks and expand it into what they truly needed.
All the Adepts and Acolytes were here now, going through their war games trials until they earned their Ranger status and were sent out on assignments across Star Force territory. Previously they had been scattered into small groups, and with the V’kit’no’sat gradually taking more and more territory away from Star Force, there hadn’t been a permanent home since Ear
th. Lara had wondered why Davis hadn’t moved them back there until she arrived and saw this place for the first time.
There was so much more room. Far beyond what Earth alone could offer even if it was uninhabited. Two of the rocky planets were massive. You wouldn’t need artificial gravity for training unless you were truly beastly, and one of those pair was a water world at that, with the pressures at the depths being the highest Star Force had ever seen. It was perfect for aquatics training, and the same could be said of the other worlds for the 5 divisions of the Star Force military that the Archons had to master.
And with the growth of the empire, there were more and more individuals being found that qualified for Maverick status. They had to go through the same training, but tailored for their race’s physical attributes. That was what occupied most of Wilson’s time now, and he hadn’t been on site for most of the Archon basic training for some time, though he always seemed to show up when one of the trainees wasn’t cutting it. They’d get the personal touch, for he hated to have anyone wash out, and few ever did, but the screening test wasn’t perfect and sometimes a lazy ass made their way through by accident.
Lara knew from personal experience that Wilson also blamed himself for every Archon that gave up the life after basic. Even those hundreds of years after. There had only been 129 of them, but they were all failures in his mind, and while she didn’t blame him, she didn’t understand how any Archon could stop being who and what they were. She really couldn’t. And those few that had were never honest about it. All they would offer was excuse after excuse, usually a ‘I’m too tired to do this’ or a ‘I didn’t sign up for all this’ line that didn’t explain anything. Endurance was the name of the game for Archons, and she was both sorry for and angry with those few that had cracked under the pressure.
There were a lot of others that just needed a vacation, and they took it. Got themselves recharged, patched up, whatever they needed, then they’d be back. Sometimes it took years of recovery after some of the things they’d been through, but Archons never quit. So how 129 of them could blew her mind to this day, and apparently it did Wilson’s as well, because the biggest thing to do to get his attention was fail as an Archon. Lara and the others were all his children, in some respects, and the Head Trainer didn’t like losing any of his children to death. But even more so he didn’t like losing them to laziness, for that, after a fashion, was treason.
And now he had called her here. Lara didn’t think it was because he was worried about her failing, but rather because there was new training to be trailblazed and he was the one person in the empire more able to do that than the Archons themselves. So as she descended down through the thick atmosphere of Forge to the huge pyramid rising 18 miles into the sky, Lara oddly felt like she was returning home despite the fact that she’d never been in this system before.
The pyramid though…that did it all. It was stair stepped like the one on Earth had been, and made of the same Yeg’gor armor. It was the only place in the empire that had it, and she could tell from her vantage point that it wasn’t completely covered yet. There was a huge swath on the western side still missing the cover stones, and perhaps more on the north, but she couldn’t see there for the dropship was landing on the third tier up on the southwestern tip that allowed her to see both the southern and western sides in their perfect geometry.
Lara stepped off the dropship and it departed immediately, leaving her to soak in the breeze and warm air from the jungle below despite the altitude. It should have been quite cold up this high, at nearly 2 miles above ground level, but then again the pyramid soaked up heat readily and released it at a standard 78.2 degrees Fahrenheit. So it must have been the heat plume around the pyramid that she was feeling, but the humidity was obviously coming from the lake to the south.
It wasn’t wide, but it stretched out past the horizon with multiple fingers running in different directions like a blue lightning bolt…and the trees were amazing. Some of them rose 3 miles high on their own, leaving her looking up underneath their top branches from a distance. Those nearest the pyramid were tiny in comparison, and that was no doubt due to the construction zone. But the others were awe inspiring, and she knew at a glance they were of V’kit’no’sat manufacture, for similar ones had once been on Earth before the Raptors razed the planet and took them all down along with the buildings.
They took a long time to grow this large too, which made her wonder how long Davis had been working on this location. It couldn’t have just been since the war ended, unless these trees were native here as well. She’d have to ask Wilson about that later.
Lara stood near the corner with the higher levels of the pyramid behind her, seeming to stretch into the northeastern sky as the pyramid sloped hard in that direction. The nearest stair-step wall was more than a mile away, then rose at least a half mile straight up to get to the next level, but she wouldn’t have to run that far, for there was a dip in the flat architecture only a couple hundred meters away that was a recessed entrance.
Lara could feel his presence before she saw Wilson walk up out of that stairway and into the light from the pair of binary stars setting in the eastern sky. He stood as tall and trim as ever, with far more muscles than Lara could ever hope for without losing her ability to walk. He waved at her to come over, despite the fact that he possessed Ikrid. In fact he had all the psionics now, after years of resistance and insisting that he learn to do things the way his body was originally intended, and the habit not to use the psionics unless absolutely necessary still apparently clung to him like a warm blanket, but it didn’t matter. When he waved her over, she would have jogged towards him even if her body wasn’t craving movement.
“Hello, Lara,” he said warmly, but firmly. “Take a lap.”
“What?” she asked, getting the feeling like she’d just done something wrong.
“One lap around the pyramid, this level. And make it quick. I need you sufficiently drained so we can talk without you getting jittery.”
“Same old, same old,” she said, sprinting off instantly along the southern edge and mentally calculating how long it would take her to run the perimeter at this level. Even with her advanced speed it was going to take a few hours…
I didn’t say you had to run, Wilson’s voice shot into her head before she was out of his telepathic range.
Lara cringed, realizing he was right. He just said take a lap, so she leaned forward and picked up her fleet, using her Yen’mer to levitate and then accelerate her movement into a bullet-like flight that required her to also use her bioshields to block the wind.
22 minutes later she streaked down the western side of the pyramid and braked heavily, stopping a few meters away from Wilson and dropped back to her feet.
“Better?” he asked.
“Much,” she said, a bit breathless, for she’d been pushing her pace hard.
“How do you like the new digs?” he asked, gesturing up at the pyramid.
“Perfect. How did you get Davis to do it?”
“It was his idea. He’s got some crazy plans for the future, as usual, but this time its galaxy-spanning stuff, and he needed a solid Archon and Maverick core to hold it all together. So he’s given us a permanent home where we can train away from the civies. Even civilian traffic is banned from the system. That’s why you had to take a warship to get her, though you probably travel on one anyway.”
“Wilson, I’m not the same as before. Everything seemed to get wiped away and I’m remembering things for the first time.”
“You should have consulted me before you tried it. I could have made the process smoother for you.”
“How?” she asked, wondering if a streak of stupidity had hit her.
“I could have modified your training to flush the toxins out of you better than running simple obstacle courses. You probably didn’t know what Vortison was doing to you, but I could have helped. I’ve been going over the records and the next person to try this is going to have a li
st a workouts to pull from.”
“I don’t think it would help in the beginning, but anything that minimizes would be much welcome.”
“You took the hit for the others,” he said matter-of-factly.
“The trailblazers didn’t need to deal with that. And I had to rebuild myself once before. That experience helped get me through it.”
“But you’re not through it yet.”
“My mind is still half missing, it seems.”
“Your body is crap too. I can tell that just standing here. You lost a lot.”
“I gained even more in the tradeoff, but yeah, I’ve got a lot to rebuild. What do you know about this Essence Morelli keeps talking about?”
“A little, but without any way to mechanically monitor it we’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way,” he said with a smirk. “Methods these medtechs will never understand. Science can’t tell you about curiosity or willpower, and I’m guessing this Essence falls into the same category.”
“I can’t even sense it.”
“Your mind is so muddled at this point I’m not surprised, but if it’s not a V’kit’no’sat or Zak’de’ron psionic, you might be searching for the wrong thing. Stay here long enough and we’ll get this figured out and you back into Archon shape.”
“I have nowhere else to go, so I’m all yours until you tell me I’m done.”
“I’ve got a load of new training courses for you. A lot of big ones we didn’t have room for in the past, and even more planned for construction. This is the Archon home you’ve always deserved, but we never had the time or resources to build. So, to the first of the old school to arrive, welcome home,” Wilson said, walking up and wrapping Lara in a big hug.
She leaned into him as she felt him in her mind, bypassing the Ikrid blocks with the skin to skin contact, then physically melted entirely as he worked his way into her memories and saw what she’d been through…and what she was still holding back. It didn’t take long for all her walls to come down in an avalanche with his reassuring presence in her head, and then the tears started to flow.