But it wasn’t the captain and his Carnus that the boy watched with such awe.
Valera Dent moved with such liquid poise, he couldn’t help but wonder if the announcer had missed the triggering of her own Overclock. Kestrel’s visual energy output hadn’t changed, though, and a quick glance and scroll through the live combat log in the top right of the feed showed no Abilities activated since Rightor’s last-ditch effort to secure himself a win.
The Iron Bishop was just that fast.
Dent’s motions were so clean, so calculated, they could have been choreographed. Her top-tier Speed and Cognition specs showed themselves off in all their glory as her entire form became a red-blue blur streaked with white to match Carnus’ constant hammer blows. Here and there the child with the pad barely 2 inches from his face could catch a clear moment of her stepping to the side or deflecting a descending strike with a heavy flick of both blades, but as a whole the two combatants didn’t allow their spectators much more than glimpses of clean action in the furious exchange.
And then, abruptly, it was done.
The boy thought he saw the moment, though he caught the opportunity, but Valera Dent moved with such speed he would never figure out if he’d seen the same thing she had, or if he was just trying to convince himself of that in retrospect. To his eyes, Alex Rightor had overdrawn, had brought the weight of the hammer just a fraction too far back in an attempt to build up as much momentum as possible. The difference was a matter of inches, barely pixels in the feed of the glass tablet, but it had been enough. The strike came, horizontally in a thundering sweep meant to cover every foot of space Dent and her Device could attempt to escape to. The chief warrant officer, though, dropped under the attack, possibly even onto all-fours—it would be impossible to tell until a frame-by-frame replay was released. The hammer sailed over her head, colliding with several of the floating externals that made up Kestrel’s red wings, crushing and sending them flying with an ear-splitting crunch as their phantom-forms processed having been destroyed.
Their sacrifice was well worth it.
The moment the hammer cleared her overhead space, Dent was lunging upwards, both swords leading the way. Rightor jerked back, seeing his fatal mistake, but even his own high Cognition and Overclocked reflexes could do nothing for him. The ivory-edged blades found their mark together, slipping under the captain’s gold faceplate in which his eyes still glowed blue, puncturing with all the power Dent could manage in her upward thrust. There was a cracking sound, and the swords broke through the top of Rightor’s helmet, having skewered him jaw-to-skull. There was a moment, almost a full second in which the hammer in the captain’s hands held, the Device kept grasped in an armored hand by the lingering will of its User.
Then the weapon fell to the broken grass with a thud, and Captain Alex Rightor went limp on the lengths of the Bishop’s swords.
“Fatal Damage Accrued,” the light, mechanical voice of the Arena announced. “Winner: Valera Dent.”
“YES!”
The exclamation came threefold, once from the crowd, once from the announcer, and once from the boy sitting in the too-tall chair several planets away from the fight. In his excitement he punched a fist into the air with another yell, then cried out as his bandaged shoulder screamed in pain at the motion.
“It. Is. OVER!” the announcer’s voice came from the pad as the boy slid it up onto the Matron’s desk in favor of clutching the offended joint, shutting his eyes tight against the stabbing ache. “Ladies and gentlemen, Chief Warrant Officer Valera Dent—the Iron Bishop herself!—walks away with her head held high, finishing her circuit in our System SCTs with an astounding 54 to 6 record! We will have interviews for you with both our combatants once Captain Rightor has recovered, and stay tuned for a return to our regularly scheduled tournament matches starting shortly! For the time being, however, let us all take a moment to applaud the chief warrant officer, and let her know that our thoughts and hopes go with her as she heads for the front line!”
There was another roar of approval from the crowd, which the boy managed to join in with again after his shoulder settled. He was just reaching for the tablet, intent on turning it off and heading back to his room, when he made out the sound of hurried footsteps not seconds before the door to the room burst open.
“What in the MIND’s name is going on in here?!”
Matron Avalyn Kast of the Estoran Center for Children stormed into her office with a fury. A flash of the NOED in her right eye had the line lights of the space flicking on, and at a glance the boy noted that not only had the aging woman clambered out of bed in her nightgown, but several of the Center’s staff—and not a few of the other children who lived there—had followed her, though they were all smart enough to gape into the room for the open doorway.
“Rei!” the Matron exclaimed in what was a half-terrified, half-livid shout when she caught sight of him. “What are you doing out of bed?! You’re supposed to be recovering!”
In answer, the boy the picked up the pad and waved it excitedly in one scarred hand, using the other to push his long, white-streaked black hair out of his grey eyes. “She won, Matron Kast! She won!”
“What are you—?” the Matron started, stuttering to a stop as she looked at the screen of the tablet, on which a reel of the most exciting moments of the exhibition match was playing. “Who—?” Then she realized what she was seeing. “Reidon Ward! Are you watching the combat tournaments again?!”
For a reply, the 11-year-old only grinned.
CHAPTER 1
Early May, 2468 - Seven Years Later
Astra System – Astra-3 – Sector 6
“The Simulated Combat Tournaments developed by the Intersystem Collective Military are arguably mankind’s greatest source of entertainment. Complex engagement training at the core of their design, since shortly after their application in the early 24th century the SCTs have also become the sole source of military funding, as well as an excellent means of recruitment. The circuits are so essential, in fact, that actual participation in the war efforts was struck as an eventual requirement for high-level combatants first in all professional SCTs, then eventually in the collegiate levels as the academic and institutional events gained their own massive intersystem viewership. If a User achieves any significant merit in either—or both—of these circuits, then deployment becomes voluntary. Strange as it may seem, many prominent civil and social scientists have touted their agreement of this method, often pointing to the research showing that a single successful SCT combatant’s impact on enlistment largely outweighs any direct effect they might have on the situation on the front lines.”
A Consideration of SCTs and Their Intersystem Influence
Lieutenant Colonel Hana von Geil, Ph.D.
Distributed by Central Command, Earth
When the punch came, Rei was ready for it.
The NOED Grandcrest Prep had provided him as part of his tuition wasn’t the best quality, but a little tinkering in the base code had provided a decent boost in processing power. As a result, the highlighted warnings in its optical frame did a good job of giving Rei fractions of a second’s advantage. When Ansley Kosh shifted his footing, twisting away ever so slightly, the readout blared red over the boy’s left arm.
So when the punch came, Rei was ready for it.
He dodged to the side, keeping his right hand up to shield his face as he jabbed with his left. The blue frame lines of the NOED in Kent’s eye were obvious too, though, so Rei wasn’t shocked when the testing blow was smacked away. A leg followed next, and he ducked, attempting to sweep at his opponent’s ankle, but the boy planted and twisted, and Rei earned himself nothing more than a painful slamming of shins. Turning his momentum into something valuable, he shifted and flipped back over his hands in an upward kick. He felt his toes catch Kosh a glancing blow under the chin, and by the time he’d rolled onto his feet again the boy had stumbled back several paces, almost outside the marked lines.
Damn, Re
i thought, realizing that might have been his chance to knock his opponent out of the ring.
A few of his teammates were shouting encouragement behind him, and he thought he heard Viv’s voice in the drone, but he tuned it all out. He had to. His right elbow was killing him after taking the weight of that flip, and Ansley Kosh had murder in his eyes as he shook off his moment of surprise and approached the center of the mat again.
Red highlights.
Rei ducked, then dodged again, Kent’s one-two combo turning half his vision crimson as the NOED only barely caught it. Rei kicked low again, this time straight on, and managed to catch Kosh in the ankle, sending his front foot sliding back. The boy caught himself on his other leg, though, and brought chopping blow jetting down at Rei’s head. Rei got both arms up in time to block, bracing for his elbow to scream in protest.
The strike never came.
WHAM!
The impact of Kent’s knee catching him square in the face would have broken Rei’s nose if it weren’t for the thin layer of reactive energy shielding his head from excessive impact, transmitted by the mandatory combat collar around his neck. Just the same, the barrier was only designed to reduce the force of a blow, so Rei wasn’t surprised to smell blood as he was thrown onto his back. He lay there for a second, stunned, and was unsurprised when he heard the shout of “Match win! Carter’s School for the Gifted!” from the referee.
Dazed, Rei only barely managed to sit up. The ref was beside him a second later, the man’s plain whites almost painful to his watering eyes.
“Easy, kid. That was a hell of a hit. Can you stand?”
It was a hell of a hit. Rei grunted and closed his eyes, pretending to consider the question. In reality, with a series of quick eye commands he had his NOED pull the footage from the mat-side cameras, then watched the last few seconds of the fight from the spectator’s angle. He had to admit that Kosh played him well. Instead of bringing the blow down on his head, the move had been a feint to get him to defend up and open himself for a knee-strike.
Block with one hand next time, idiot, Rei berated himself, already hearing Coach Kat’s criticism ringing through his ears.
“I can stand,” he told the referee, opening his eyes again and pushing himself up. As he did, he tasted metal, prompting him to bring a hand up to his nose. His fingers came away bloody, soaking the wraps that looped over most of his exposed limbs to cover up as much of the scarring as possible, or at least what wasn’t hidden under his black combat suit already. He looked up, offering Ansley Kosh a grin. “Good match. Hope you don’t mind if we don’t shake hands.” He held up the reddened hand in explanation.
Kosh, for his part, grimaced. It made his designed, handsome features take on an ugly quality that even reached his orangish eyes. He addressed the ref. “Can I go?” He asked, looking like he distinctly preferred to be anywhere but sharing a mat with Rei.
The ref frowned, but nodded, having no reason to keep the victor from his cheering teammates. The Carter’s fighters, in their red robes, were all smiles and shouts as Kosh turned on his bare heels and stepped out of the ring. There were laughs as well, but Rei chose to assume those were hoots of excitement rather than anything else.
He didn’t have the energy to believe anything else, in that moment.
“I’m good,” he told the ref with a nod of thanks. “I can walk off on my own.”
The man patted him on the shoulder, offering a look of forced encouragement. “Good fight.”
It made Rei feel sick.
He turned and approached his own bench. Coach Kat was standing at the edge of the mat, arms crossed and looking bored. She offered Rei a cursory once-over, lacking anything more than apathy, eyes lingering on his bloody face.
“Block with one hand next time, idiot,” she muttered by way of feedback, then waved him by without uncrossing her arms. “Go get cleaned up.”
Having expected nothing less, Rei moved on without another word.
There were no more shouts of encouragement from the combat team, now, much less cheers or smiles. On the contrary, the majority of the boys and girls of the squad didn’t meet his eyes as he stepped off the mat, or even move out of his way to make it easier to reach the bench. He still got there, though, and had already sat down to start looking for a clean towel before discovering his punishment wasn’t half over.
“What the hell, Ward? Do you have any useful function, other than acting like a living training dummy?”
With an internal sigh, Rei looked up in time to find a broad-shouldered boy standing over him, his black hair striped with artfully designed slashes of red, his clear blue eyes burning in his perfect features.
“I just got kneed in the face, Lee. Hard.” A few strands of Rei’s white hair had fallen out of the tail he’d gather it in behind his head, and he blew them out of his face before waving at his bloody nose for emphasis. “Are you going to cut me some slack, or just keep up the trend of being a monumental dick?”
Lee Jackson’s face hardened, and he put his hands on his knees so he could bend down to be closer to eye-level with Rei. “You’d think three losses in a row would have taught you to shut your damn mouth, freak. If you cost us the lead in this tournament, I’m gonna—”
“Lee, it’s the 25th century. If you’ve got a thing for Rei, you can just tell him. No one’s gonna judge.”
Rei wasn’t proud of the breath of relief he involuntarily took at the sound of Viv’s voice, but it was worth Lee snapping up and away from him, cheeks flushed. From his left, a tall girl with brown hair—twisted into artful curls that had no business lasting the length of a day-long school combat tournament—slid into view from out of the rest of the gathered team.
“What?” Lee seethed. “I’m not—”
“Oh, you’re not into him? Weird.” Viv cocked her head in feigned confusion as she approached the two of them, people moving aside for her without hesitating. “You have a tendency to get in his face so much, I figured a burning desire for some make-out action was the only plausible explanation.”
There was a roll of healthy laughter from the other members of the squad, and Lee’s cheeks turned almost the color the streaks in his hair.
“Screw you, Arada. Ward just gave up three consecutive matches. If he loses us this tournament—”
“It’ll have about as much to do with you as with him, jackass. His day’s record is 2 and 3. What’s yours again? Oh right. 3 and 2. And you’ve got what? 6 inches and 40 pounds on him? If Rei had your height and weight, you’d probably make a better barbell than opponent for him.”
More laughter, louder this time. To top it all off, Lee wasn’t quick enough on the comeback, giving Viv enough of an opening to lift a hand and make a shooing motion in his direction. “Walk away, loser. Go play with your boytoys.”
Rei couldn’t decide if Lee looked more ready to explode or melt into a puddle, but at that moment one of the boy’s friends decided to save him some face by taking him by the shoulder and pulling him into the gathered bodies of the others. When he was gone, Viv turned to Rei, holding out clean white towel he hadn't seen hanging from her other hand.
“Asshole,” she muttered under her breath.
Rei grinned up at her, accepting the towel and starting to wipe off his face as he answered. “That’s rude. I kinda thought I was in the right, there.”
The girl snorted in answer, turning to plop down in the empty space to his left, earning her a sidelong eye from Rei.
Viviana Arada was, it could be argued, his only real friend at Grandcrest Preparatory Academy, which technically made her his only friend period. It had taken him a while—and then some—to come to term with her interest in spending time with him, but a mutual distaste for the politics of the Grandcrest cliques and a shared interest in CAD-combat and the SCT circuits had proven enough to make them fast friends—to the displeasure of more than just the students of the Academy. In a lot of ways, having Viv as a companion had made life a lot harder for Rei in a sc
hool he’d known he was never going to fit into. She was gorgeous, she was smart, and she was popular—or would have been, if she spent less time with him—and he’d taken more than one punch from some jealous suitor of both sexes.
On the other hand, Viv was also the only reason Rei had made it through all 4 years at Grandcrest at all.
“How’s the pain today?”
The question caught him off guard, but only for a moment. Viv wasn’t looking at him, pretending to watch a match he knew she couldn’t see through the black-clad bodies of their teammates. If anyone else had asked him that, he would have lied through his teeth, like he did every time Coach Kat or the school doctor did, or even Matron Kast in their occasional NOED calls.
But Viv wasn’t anyone else.
“Not great,” he admitted, setting aside the now-bloody towel to start undoing the wraps of his right arm. “It was acting up during the fight.”
“I could tell. You’re supposed to be taking it easy, Rei.”
He shrugged, trying for a grin as the last of the bindings fell away, revealing a thin forearm marked with a score of identical, round scars. “Since when have I been good at taking it easy?”
“Since you have surgery tomorrow, and the CAD-Assignment Exam is in a week, jerk.”
Rei shrugged again, a little more stoically this time, flexing his arm and feeling relieved when his elbow only mildly protested. “I’ll be fine. It’s just another laser correction. A couple days in a sling, and I’ll be good to go.” He turned, raising both eyebrows at Viv and pretending to flex for her. “Not like I have much to worry about in this form of epic manliness, right?”
It was Viv’s turn to look at him sidelong, but after a moment she couldn’t seem to help herself, and she cracked a smile at the image he cut, thin chest out and scrawny arms up. “Maybe not, but get your CAD and the girls will be all over you in a year or two.”
Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4) Page 102