NINETY-SIX: The B List, part two

  96     Alden was keeping his goal for the night simple. Assuming they were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their club practice time, he was just going to use this opportunity to learn what it felt like to run around and protect himself with a burden of this size, shape, and weight. How did the hundred kilos of unpreserved sandbags trapped inside the preserved suitcase affect his skill fatigue? How did moving around with it work? Could he reliably keep his hands on it to maintain entrustment without doing something like strapping it to himself? Was it even practical to try to weaponize something like this? Being able to easily move this much weight is already so good, and it’s probably going to be more useful in the long run for transport instead of creating ridiculously heavy weapons. He kept thinking of how much easier something like this would have made his life three months ago. Has it really just been three months since I was hauling equipment and drums around the lab to help prep for Kibby’s Great Big Boom? Less than three months. But it felt like a lifetime ago. Celena North was pretty combat oriented, even at the high school level. The constant competition and pressure from facing a wide variety of other talents was part of what encouraged people to intuit new uses for their powers, stretch their abilities, and level. But Alden was looking forward to learning a lot of the less flashy stuff more. Moving large objects. Running. Concealment. Dealing with complicated environments. He’d kill for a wilderness survival course, but wilderness survival was one thing that an Avowed almost never needed. It wasn’t like you could get lost in a desert and starve to death when you had the System in your head. Maybe the university offered special classes for people who were anticipating summons? I have to check that out. He kept thinking about the big demon on Moon Thegund. The one he hadn’t ever properly seen or had to deal with. He wanted to be able to survive if he ran into something like that, so combat training was good. But even if he had to fight something or someone to survive in the future…that was just one way to die. There were a million other ways that had nothing to do with combat at all. What if the car hadn’t existed? What if there hadn’t been mover discs to flip it? What if the water at the lab had quit a couple of weeks into his stay? There was magic for all of that. His skill. Stats. Spells he could learn. So, I’ll do whatever the school wants, but my personal focus should be filling in those gaps. He still wanted to hit something really hard with the suitcase before the practice hour was over, though. Alden spotted Andrzej sitting on the bottom bleacher. The Polish boy was holding his cudgel in his lap and talking to a girl wearing a t-shirt over her gym suit that said, “Ask Me About Gympie Gympie,” in black marker. Before he could head over to say hello, his interface flashed: [FLOOR ON]   A small floor status notice remained even after the larger notification faded away. “All right, my little B’s!” a voice called. Alden looked over to see Luna Plim wheeling herself backward into the gym in a rolling desk chair. Her bright red hair was contained in a bun by a pair of pencils, and she was wearing a yellow raincoat over her own unitard. A trio of basketball-sized water balls were following her around like they were her pets. “You’re free to wreak whatever havoc you had planned for tonight. Let me know if you need me to set up a private block for dueling or practice. Injury realism is set to ten percent.” “The warning ouch!” BeeBee shouted. “Thanks, Instructor Plim,” several people called. “If you need any advice, I’ll be in my office,” the teacher said. Then she kept on rolling her office chair across the huge gym until she and her pet water came to a stop in the center of the floor. “Instructor, kill permission has to be explicit—” “I forgot again. Thank you, Rahul. Everyone, you can kill your clubmates today if they don’t mind. This isn’t class. Experiment fearlessly! Ella-Clara, I got all eight of your messages this week. Yes, you can come see me. I’ve been thinking about new ideas for your special friend.” The girl who’d been lapping the gym ever since Alden arrived ran toward the instructor, her chin-length brown hair swinging. A couple of people grumbled. Four students chased after Ella-Clara to wait for their own turn to talk to the instructor. She was the one who had the most victories on The Beat List, Alden thought, staring at the girl’s back. And what’s her special friend? His best guess was that she was a Meister, and her friend was her weapon. What should I start with? They only had an hour. It seemed much too short now. Part of him wanted to go lurk around Plim, hoping to talk to her, but it seemed like other people had been in touch with her throughout the week asking specific questions about powers. It was probably a dick move to try to edge his way in ahead of the established club members when he just had a general thirst for advice. Now that he knew she was their advisor and she worked this way, he would think of some questions and message her to prep for next time. He looked around to see what everyone else was doing for their own practice. There were twenty-nine students here tonight, which meant Alden was seeing most of the B-ranks in the program all at once. Three pairs were fighting with their powers already. Francis was wandering around talking to people and making various tones with his bell rings. The boy who’d been jumping up the bleachers earlier was now doing gymnastics…wow, badly. Alden cringed as the guy attempted an aerial and landed on his head. But he jumped right up again and kept going. The gym is great. You can try out so many things you’d be rightfully scared to do otherwise. He watched as a girl ran past with a pair of custom-made kites flying over her head. “Alden, are you needing a partner for something?” It was Andrzej. The girl in the Gympie Gympie shirt was beside him. Alden smiled at them. “I was taking everything in. I’ve got a suitcase here that will protect me from hits and weigh a hundred kilograms when I drop it.” He lifted the suitcase a little higher. “I’m hoping to get a feel for using something this size and shape as a shield.” The girl leaned forward with an interested expression. “Are you a U?” she asked in a French accent. “Rabbit.” “Haha! Right.” Andrzej shook his head at her. Alden’s Rabbitness had come out during a discussion in Engaging with the Unexpected a few days ago. “Oh no! <<Sorry. I love Rabbits. I had a pet rabbit when I was little. I…>>” “It’s fine.” “Laure and I were going to set up for blind fighting,” said Andrzej. “With some target drones if we could not find a partner. You could be our target instead?” “What’s blind fighting?” “Help us lay down the grass. I will show you.”   ********   Andrzej had such an honest face and such forthcoming mannerisms that Alden had almost forgotten he’d initially been suspicious of the Polish boy’s eagerness to take Cudgel Meister off his hands. He’d said he wanted to offload Chainer quickly, which was apparently true. And he’d said he wanted a Meister class with the highest possible Strength stat so he’d meet requirements for a hero team internship he had in mind down the road, which was no doubt also true. But he hadn’t been completely honest. Because what he’d most wanted was a very specific Meister skill that was only offered to a few of the rarer and more brutish-seeming subclasses, Meister of Knuckles and Meister of Cudgel among them. Andrzej knew about it because his anti-Velra uncle was a high rank Knuckle Meister who’d acquired it several years ago as a secondary skill. It was called Throughblow. With it, Andrzej could make the force of his weapon strikes land on the other side of whatever he hit. He could swing his club at a pane of glass, leave it unharmed, and destroy a target several yards beyond it. It turned a close-combat weapon into one with some range. And Andrzej was planning to build his whole battle style around it. His uncle apparently loved it and had been fixated on leveling it ever since he got it. Andrzej said it was at least a nine-top, with every level increase boosting the distance the throughblow could travel. It made being a dude with a club so much more cool than Alden had anticipated. “Being able to fight at different distances is good for a Meister,” Andrzej explained as they positioned tall foam blocks in a line across the gym. Laure and a couple of helpers were laying down trays of sod to make patches of the life element. And ground, incidentally. “Throughblow gives many options. I can hide behind walls and still attack. I can damage things held in locked rooms. Versatility.” “It sounds awesome,” Alden said enthusiastically as he maneuvered another block into place to build the wall Andrzej would be hitting through. The main problem Andrzej faced with his chosen fighting style was that sometimes he wouldn’t be able to see the targets he wanted to hit. He had no shielding skills and wasn’t likely to acquire them, so he planned to use the environment as his shield. But at present, he didn’t have any way of detecting things through opaque walls. He had a list of spell impressions, sensory enhancements, and magical tools he would be collecting and mastering over the coming years that would allow him to visualize or hear things through solid objects. But until then… “Blind fighting practice. To improve my reasoning and aiming.” “And my Life Shaping!” Laure called. The French girl was a third year. To distinguish herself from other Life Shapers and be more useful at their rank, she’d decided a year ago to make a shift from focusing on more traditional telekinetic attacks to using her control over plants for detection. She said she was still an amateur, but when someone stepped on a sod tile she was using her power on, she should know. And she would be giving Andrzej targeting directions based on that. “I have a trait that makes me move better over ground,” Alden told them. “Should I use it to make things harder for you?” “A little,” Andrzej said after thinking about it for a moment. “But not too much. I am not that good at hitting what I can’t see.” After they finished setting up, Alden had his suitcase full of sand re-entrusted to him, and they got started. It was dull for the first several minutes. Alden walked slowly between sod tiles with his suitcase, being sure to stand on each one for at least a few seconds before heading to another. He held his shield between him and the foam wall, just in case, but none of Andrzej’s strikes came close to hitting him. The Cudgel Meister had done versions of this exercise before, but he and Laure had never partnered together to try to coordinate. There was a lot of French-Polish-English discussion going on over there as they sorted themselves out. But then, about five minutes in, they finally got quiet. Did they switch to texting? Alden wondered as he stepped off one patch of grass and headed for another. A moment later, something smashed into his bag. It was a solid hit. Not like Heloísa throwing a chunk of concrete , but more substantial than the wind strikes that Tatiana Evans—the Sky Shaper Alden had defeated in his first ever duel—had delivered. “You got me!” he called excitedly. <<I told you I knew where he was!>> Laure cried. Andrzej poked his head around the edge of the wall. “Are you all right?” Alden nodded. “Your shield?” “It’s a very sturdy shield.” And on top of that, it was so big it could cover him from chin to knee when he held it longways. Andrzej narrowed his eyes. “I will hit it harder next time.” “I might hit you with some grass, too!” Laure shouted. As if to emphasize her point, several of the sod tiles shifted closer to Alden. The pace picked up. Andrzej was not as speedy or as accurate as the third year. Sod chunks flew at Alden much more frequently than cudgel blows did. But the cudgel strikes were a lot more powerful. This was proven when Andrzej aimed too low and sent one of the sod trays flying across the gym, shedding clumps of grass and dirt. It attracted attention, and it wasn’t long before a second year Adjuster joined the people on the other side of the wall and started lobbing small orbs of lightning at Alden. He had appalling aim, but he was making up for it with quantity. Alden had to begin jogging and actively dodging. And with more noise and activity in their section of the gym, they started to...