ONE HUNDRED NINETY-SIX: Flashes VIII

196

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Ignacio had left him with a knife. Søren wasn’t sure if it was to protect him or to keep him company while he waited here, flat on the floor, snugged between his tube-shaped sandbag and the barrier. Maybe when a person had several dozen knives on them they started to feel more like stickers or pieces of chewing gum than weapons. A friend is sad? Bored? Offer them one of your sharp things to brighten their day!

It was one of his nicer knives, too. Or one of his nicer-looking ones anyway. Ignacio’s gym supply was mostly made up of knives he didn’t mind ruining, so they tended to be battered. This one had a long double-edged blade polished to a mirror finish. Søren tilted it and noticed the way the light bounced off to shine on the rough fabric of the sandbag. A piece of shiny metal is a better Shaper than I am.

That was an exaggeration and a pointless thought. More important things were happening. Søren angled the blade so that he could see some of the fighters reflected in it as they closed in on Instructor Klein.

Amazing. They look amazing.

And it would have been completely unmanageable to be there in the middle of them. Figuring out where Finlay and Febri were moving would be impossible, and that was only two of the people involved.

What if they do it? What if we actually make it to the end today? I could get some help from—

The feeling of his sandbag being dragged away from him startled him so much that he gasped and sprang into a crouch, knife held up to defend himself.

“You can come with me now,” Winston Heelfeather said, looking down on him through mirrored lenses. “I’ll take you across with my team.”

He was hefting Søren’s sandbag onto his own shoulders.

“What?” Søren lowered the knife because Winston was talking like he was completely confident he had Søren’s cooperation for some obvious plan. Søren wondered if he’d missed a sudden problem that made a team switch-up necessary or if a message had come that he hadn’t noticed.

And then Winston said, “I’ll be taking this in any case, to protect my team. Come with us if you want. It’s better for you than waiting around and better for the S’s if they don’t have to take care of you. Don’t say I didn’t give you a fair chance.”

Søren’s mouth fell open. He started to realize what was going on even though he didn’t understand why it was going on. But before he could form an argument or lunge forward, the speedster was spinning and taking off.

As Søren accepted the reality of his situation in the next blink, his thoughts went from tumbling confusion to rising fear and fury.

My sandbag! Why?! His team’s running ahead? He was supposed to be helping! The plan! My teammates! What happens when the wind starts? I have a knife!

He was running after Winston Heelfeather. He was throwing the knife like it was a ball because he had no idea how to throw a knife. It sailed past Winston’s left ear. Søren was losing ground.

That tended to happen when you chased after Speed Brutes, but…

I can’t. I can’t let them all down and ruin this last run because I couldn’t even protect a bag of sand.

He tried to run faster, and couldn’t. He looked around for something else to throw, and there was nothing.

The knife was shining on the floor, too far away for Søren to pick it up, but so bright that it looked like he ought to be able to in another way. Fine, he thought, pointing at it. Fine.

He jabbed his other index finger at a glinting piece of debris in a distant pile. He started to glow.

I don’t care how useless it is or how stupid I look doing it. I don’t care if all I manage is making him sparkle. By the time the wind hits, I’m going to use every last bit of magic the System gave me.

If he sparkles bright enough, maybe it’ll distract him so I can kick him in his stupid face.

 

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“If you happen to see Søren trying to shape, give him a little time to finish the job,” Torsten advised the volunteers in the classroom. “He’s having difficulty grasping his powers, and since his results have been so lackluster, he rarely musters the confidence to use anything but his fists in actual combat. I’ve spoken with him about it. I told him that even if he only warms up the enemy’s feet, he still ought to try to get them warmer than he did the last time. I hope that was the right thing.

“He’s agreed to work on it, but I expect him to be especially reluctant today because of the team component. The pressure of our last team challenge was a little too much for him, and he worries about bothering the other students.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but he only glanced once again at Søren’s wanted poster, sighed, and moved to the last one on the list.

“And finally, this is our first Rabbit student in the Talent Development Program. Alden Thorn.”

 

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All class, Instructor Waker had been practicing his pitching from a fixed position at the far end of the gym, by the finish line. He’d only dashed around or jumped up into the air a few times to change the angle of his throws. Alden had been more focused on when the strikes would be coming than where exactly they’d come from, but he thought Big Snake usually changed up his style when the people he wanted to hit were glued to another team. One strategy for dealing with the shock traps was to follow in the footsteps of others and hope they ran into them all for you, and Big Snake obviously didn’t consider it fair sportsmanship to hit his targets by sending one of his projectiles through a team enjoying a reprieve from his attacks. So he moved when he needed to.

He was moving now, preparing to bounce into the air on legs that could kick down trees when the man was in the mood for some casual woodcarving.

Why isn’t he classified as a hyperbole already?

The question flashed through Alden’s mind as one of his feet hit his own personal ground patch and launched him forward and upward. Before he could think through whether he should protect the teammate he guessed the giant dog crate might be aimed at, his body had already committed him to trying it.

Haoyu, Lexi, and Kon were all possibilities since they were either moving forward or attacking. Kon was the most vulnerable one, so Alden was headed toward him.

And toward the battle.

His stomach clenched as something that was probably one of Tuyet’s darts whizzed past his neck. Marsha was swinging. Astrid was stiff as a board on the floor. Torsten Klein seemed to be everywhere.

Alden landed hard. He didn’t hurt himself, and his balance was good. But he didn’t have time to be pleased that his practices with Bobby and his wordchain were paying off. He really wasn’t that far from where he’d just been crouching with Everly, but he’d jumped into a riot of flying bodies, spells, and weapons that was worse than he’d expected. The plan for corpse duty had been to run in and rescue the first person to fall near the perimeter of the fight, but now that he was here, he realized there was no perimeter to speak of.

Kon, moving to get beside Lexi, had looked as though he was near the edge of it. At the moment, though, Alden was just a step or two away from him, and there wasn’t anything like an edge here. Either the battlefield had expanded in the time it took him to jump to this spot, or it was a different, even less comprehensible place once you were inside it. Yelling in a couple of languages, popping sounds, a brief whoosh of wind so hard he staggered, knives over his head. And the Agility Brutes were the worst as far as visual confusion went. Finlay was fast, but his feet stayed mostly on the floor. Febri and Mehdi were behaving like popcorn kernels, exploding and flying off in random directions in response to the heat of battle.

This is one hundred percent not where I need to be. This is too central to—

Dog crate!

It was coming in hard from above, launched by Big Snake from high up and far away, but still accurate. It was going right toward the brothers, so Alden was already moving again, leaping with his shield up, feeling a swell of energy as he realized he’d gotten the timing right and he was going to intercept the crate perfectly.

And then Febri was crashing into the metal cage from the side and wrapping his arms around it. He used Instant Corners to redirect his own body, and the next thing Alden knew, the dog crate he’d come to save Kon from was flying toward Klein. Who was no longer in the way when it arrived, of course.

It slammed into the floor meters away, and Jeffy fell over it. He wasn’t even supposed to be a part of this fight; he just hadn’t managed to clear out from being on the bait team yet. Or he didn’t want to clear out.

“Alden, you came to save us!”

“You’re both supposed to be over there with Everly!”

“You’re supposed to be whipping Klein, not waving Writher around like a broom handle you don’t know how to use. Hit him. Hit him!”

“Shut up! That piece of bicycle you threw landed closer to New Zealand than to the enemy. Both of you get lost or get behind me.”

The Roberts brothers were talking so fast Alden mostly got the impression of Kon being enthusiastic and Lexi being stressed rather than the words.

“Behind me!” Lexi shouted again.

There was no real behind him, though. Not if he meant that Alden and Kon should position themselves so that he was closer to the danger than they were. The danger was coming from every direction. Alden would need to spin like a top to keep Instructor Klein in view, and that was assuming he didn’t try to dodge anything else going on out here.

Grab and go. That’s all I can do. Grab someone and go.

His eyes skimmed for problems. Heloísa was crawling aggressively—too far away. Astrid was just lying there like a statue, clearly stiff-suited. Finlay was shouting and falling as he took one of Marsha’s slashes to the lower body. It was impossible to tell whose fault it was. She might have aimed without considering him, or he might have just zipped right into the path of it.

The Speed Brute’s body slid and rolled across the floor toward Alden and the brothers like he’d been thrown from a car on the freeway. God, that looks horrible.

“Kon, we grab Finlay and go!” he said.

Then he ran for the speedster. He was breathing hard. He didn’t know which way to point his shield. There were actually a lot of factors in getting that right if multiple types of threat were coming his way, and he couldn’t sort it all. The overwhelming pace of the violence was making this different from a typical moment in class. He felt like he needed to zero in on something, and apparently it was going to be the person he’d just seen take a serious injury.

His thoughts were jumbled, but the jumble was pointing in that direction. Grab Finlay. Maybe hurl him toward the starting line. He might even make it back in time to help once his suit gets res—duck!

He didn’t even know who he was ducking under. Some airborne figure that would have taken his head off if he hadn’t. Things were impacting his shield. Wind. A bicycle bell. A metal shard.

That’s fine. Debris is fine. I’m not too tired to protect the shield from that.

“I’ll carry him!” Kon yelled, lunging ahead of Alden to grab the Scottish boy. “Go for the start!”

Okay, Kon’s with me. Finlay’s in his arms. Gotta keep Kon from taking a bad hit.

If Kon got safely away with Finlay, that was two saved. If Kon got away, that was one more teammate outside this mess to make sure they didn’t get completely wiped.

Where’s the way out?

Only seconds had passed since he’d landed in the midst of this melee, and even though he couldn’t possibly see what was happening with everyone, he had a sense that something about the fight was going badly for his side of it. It was everything, all together, looking not quite right from moment to moment.

He spotted a girl with silver hair, closer than he’d expected her to be, turning to run back to Haoyu and the starting line as a fragment of washing machine grazed past her.

Everly? Why?

She was supposed to be out of the way. The fight had sprawled outward to reach her.

That’s what’s bad. Space isn’t something we wanted Klein to have, but he’s managing to make it for himself by spreading us out.

It was only a brief realization as he tried to cover Kon’s retreat, nothing he could act on.

Galecourse had to be close to finishing her lap. And the good guys had to be close to losing this bold play.

Alden was approaching another realization—that dropping his shield to save his skill for their final attempt at the finish was probably the right decision, since he’d just seen Haoyu in a position of relative safety and Everly was still on her feet. Before he could make that call, though, he stopped dead at the sight of the dog crate again. It was barely dented even though it had come from the trash pile and been tossed by two S-ranks in rapid succession.

And it was now in one of Torsten Klein’s hands. He’d just landed on the floor a few meters away.

His eyes were pointed in Alden’s direction.

Kon had stopped beside Alden. Finlay’s breath was on the back of his hand. Whatever decision he’d been about to make about the shield vanished from his thoughts. The sight of Klein standing before him dug into him and triggered actual fear in a way that MPE danger almost never did.

The instructor tended to wear a slight smile when they were going after him hard during their “catch Klein” sessions. He wasn’t smiling at the moment. One of his legs was stiff, one of his hands didn’t work, he was bent slightly in a way that suggested an injury Alden couldn’t identify. And none of it made him look weaker.

Mehdi and Febri came in from either side of him, in an attack that had to have been coordinated by at least one of them. Shrike’s knife and its followers were crossing just over their heads.

Alden’s stomach clenched as the crate swung and knocked Febri out of the air. Mehdi was on the instructor for the briefest of instants, and then he was being slammed to the floor at the man’s feet.

Klein’s eyes hadn’t turned to see either of them. They were fixed on Alden like cold steel.

Alden had exercised his imagination a lot today. He’d spent this afternoon at North of North and this evening here in class, asking himself what he would do if certain attacks had come from a bokabv. What if the enemy had the power to damage the car? What would he do if it aimed itself at Kibby?

Right now…

Torsten Klein looked just a little bit like a demon.

 

******

a very short while ago

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Winston felt sick. He had thought that no class could ever be worse than the one where he’d been tricked into decapitating himself by his Machiavellian roommate and a disturbingly ambitious Rabbit. But this one was a new low.

His teammates were…

No. Never mind. He had chosen to protect them, so he would.

Their Vocal Brute couldn’t aim his voice if he was nervous, and he said Winston made him nervous. Olive had too many opinions for someone who got blown away if you weren’t holding onto her, and she was ineffective if you did hold her, because then it was obvious to the enemy which of her fakes were fake. Rebecca could have been really helpful since she could cover a lot of ground quickly, but she was so ticked-off that Astrid had refused to team up with her that she kept glancing over there even though Winston had told her he would watch Max’s team for tricks and she should watch Haoyu’s parents.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

And Sanjay just kept saying, “Relax, duuude. Relaaax,” in an odd way that Winston was afraid was supposed to be an American accent. Winston couldn’t tell if the guy was trying to bond, or if he was making fun of him. If he had to take an A-rank Shaper for this run, he wished he’d gotten Njeri instead.

But these people were his team. He was devoted to them like a leader—one who was not a jerk—should be. It had to be one hundred percent obvious to everyone in the room that Winston’s team was the weakest and that he was trying to do something nice here. Only nobody would give them any help.

There were three teams with S-ranks, since you couldn’t count Kon. Those teams didn’t need the elemental weights. And yet, they’d all taken more than one of the big ones. They’d been throwing them around, casually keeping them under their arms like pocketbooks, floating on top of them, and chopping them up.

If Olive had a sandbag, Winston wouldn’t have to hold her. If Rebecca had a sandbag, she could control her jumps in high winds. If Sanjay had a lifematter bag, maybe he could entertain himself by talking to it, so that his leader could think about a strategy that would get this bunch of misfits safely to the end.

Winston had wanted a victory so badly today. Real victory, like Feather’sFavoriteNYC talked about in the encouraging comment he’d kept pulled up on his interface all class.

Don’t let the haters get you down. Let your victory be your answer!

But he’d admitted after the first hour that he would settle for reaching the finish line even if it was behind the other teams. Even if a first place run with smiling teammates patting him on the back would have been more of a moment, at this point, crossing at all was going to be momentous enough.

They finally had weight they could use to move forward in the wind without just hanging onto each other. The weights were literal garbage Winston had collected for them all, but they had them. He was circling the team as fast as he could, trying to keep his eyes on every enemy at once and on Max, who couldn’t be trusted. He would absolutely throw a trap in front of Winston’s team as soon as Winston let his guard down.

So Winston was circling. He was tired. He was feeling bad about their chances and very worried about the way some people had become prejudiced against him after the drama that had been stirred up by the Arfdog incident, Everly and Finlay insinuating stuff, and Alden suddenly producing a commendation that nobody had heard about before now.

The annoyance in some of their voices when I pointed out that as a speedster I could have gotten to the weights before them if I hadn’t taken time to help those in need. They definitely weren’t treating me this way last week.

His first stroke of luck all class happened then, and he shouted for a halt. By saying, “Halt!” which was more professional than using stop and go, obviously.

Finlay had just gone down hard as he approached the finish. He’d fallen on top of Astrid. A red line had appeared.