Chương 157: The Apex Flyer

"Apex flyer coming in on Friday." Leo sat up on the cot.

"They actually exist?" The flyer across from him paused mid-bite.

"You don't know? I figured you two would've crossed paths by now."

"I really don't." Leo shook his head.

"I didn't even know they were real until you mentioned it just now." The flyer stared at him. At the next table, a guy leaned back in his chair, grinning.

"Trust me. You know the flyer." Leo ran through everyone he knew who fit the profile. Gold Core. High Divine Sense. Connected to him somehow, based on the way these people were acting. He drew a blank. A technician interrupted their conversation.

"Chen? They set up a space for you. Follow me." Leo followed the technician out of the main cavern and into the support complex built into its walls. They walked past supply rooms and equipment lockers, stepping aside for maintenance workers hauling sensor cables. The technician gave him the tour as they went: canteen through the double doors on the left, gym at the end of the main hall, VR pod bay third door on the right. They turned a corner into a residential wing.

Identical doors stretched in both directions, each marked with a number and nothing else. The technician stopped at one of them.

"This is you." The room inside was pretty bare bones. It had a cot, a locker, and a spiritual qi outlet for cultivation. Unfortunately this outlet had an ID scanner. Leo briefly considered if he should try to do his daily cultivation in the recovery room with its free spiritual qi. But there was probably a rule against it, even if nobody had said so. He wasn't going to do something he wasn't supposed to and lose his privileges here. This was his life for the next few days. Drill, recover, sleep, repeat.

Leo lay on the cot for ten minutes. His body was tired. His divine sense felt stretched thin from hours of constant awareness. But he wasn't done. He thought about the flyers he'd followed today. The ones who'd been running these drills for years. They were resting now, recovering for tomorrow's exercises, pacing themselves across a training schedule measured in years. Leo didn't have years. He needed to catch up to the rest of the league. He wanted to start in the season this fall rather than sit on the sidelines.

Every hour he spent resting was an hour he wasn't closing the gap between him and the veterans. He stood up. His legs protested. His shoulders ached from the earlier runs. None of it mattered. Leo walked back toward the staging platform. Another wave of flyers was forming up for a new drill. He fell in behind them without a word. The squad lifted off. The emplacements opened fire. Leo flew into the simulated flak and started grinding.

By Tuesday night, Leo's damage counter had dropped from sixty points per drill to forty-two. He stopped trailing behind the flyers and started moving with them. When the lead flyer broke left, Leo broke left. When the wingmen scattered to draw fire, Leo read the gap they were creating and slid into it. The military flyers noticed. A few nodded at him between runs. One offered him a ration pack during a recovery break.

"You're learning," she said.

"Most civilians take weeks to stop flying like idiots." Leo took the ration pack.

"How long until I stop flying like an idiot entirely?"

"Years." She shrugged.

"But you'll be a useful idiot by Friday." Wednesday morning. His average damage taken hovered in the mid-thirties. He was reading the emplacements now. The way qi pooled in the targeting arrays before they fired. The subtle rotation of turret housings that telegraphed their next angle of attack. The rhythm of reload cycles that created windows where he had the sky to himself. Zone avoidance. Timing. Positioning. The fundamentals that every flyer in this Air Force base had spent years mastering.

But the shrapnel still hit him. Every time he crossed a blast radius, every time an explosion bloomed in his flight path, the fragments found him. His Omnidirectional Awareness tracked every piece of simulated steel. He could see the trajectories and identify the exact fragments that would strike him and where. He just couldn't do anything about it. His body moved too slowly. By the time his brain processed the threat and his Governing Vessel carried the command to his Dantian, the fragments had already arrived.

The gap between perception and execution was measured in milliseconds, and milliseconds were everything. Wednesday afternoon. Another drill ended. Leo descended to the recovery room and found his usual cot occupied by a flyer he didn't recognize. He found another spot near the wall and sank into it. The math kept running in his head. His execution time was 2. 5 milliseconds. Vince had called that alien. But the fragments still reached him in six milliseconds. That left 3.

5 milliseconds of flight time after his body started moving. At T4 speeds, 3. 5 milliseconds covered maybe eight inches of lateral movement. Eight inches. The difference between a clean dodge and a direct hit. In theory. If he started his evasion at exactly the right moment, if his vector was exactly correct, he should be able to dodge the flak from 25 feet away. In practice, he was failing every single time. Everyone else was focusing on zone avoidance and positioning.

That was the standard approach to T4 flak, refined over decades of doctrine. But standard approach wouldn't get him a starting spot. The NFL veterans had decades of combat experience. Just being 'good enough' wasn't enough. Leo needed a special edge. He knew that if he could learn how to dodge the shrapnel, not just the blast zone, but the individual fragments, he could fly through airspace that everyone else treated as death. He could take angles that veterans wouldn't consider.

He could create openings where none existed. This was his edge. His one path to the starting rotation. He just needed to figure out how to do it. A horn sounded through the cavern. Three short blasts. Leo looked up. Around him, flyers were standing, moving toward the exits. The recovery room emptied in under a minute. He grabbed a passing technician.

"What's happening?"

"Live-fire exercise." The technician was already moving.

"All flyers to observation bunker. You don't want to be out there when they start shooting real ordnance." Leo followed the crowd.

The observation bunker was built into the cavern wall, fifty feet above the main staging platform. Reinforced glass stretched across its front face, offering an unobstructed view of the Gate of Contrition replica and the destroyer berth. Leo found a spot near the glass and watched. The destroyer emerged from its maintenance bay. Three hundred feet of spiritual steel slid forward on formation arrays that kept its hull hovering far above the cavern floor. Twin flak cannons jutted from its forward deck.

Smaller turrets lined the sides. The entire surface crawled with inscription work, dense patterns that pulsed faintly blue. It looked like something that could crack a mountain. The destroyer reached its staging position and oriented toward a section of the Gate's western face. Not the whole structure. A single fortified cluster: twelve emplacements arranged in overlapping fields of fire, protecting one of the secondary entrances.

More concentrated firepower than anything Leo had faced in the flyer drills, but a fraction of what the full Gate could bring to bear. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. A pause. Leo felt the cavern's ambient qi shift as the Gate's formation arrays powered up. Then the Gate replica opened fire. Real ordnance. The first salvo screamed across the cavern and struck the destroyer's shields. Not holographic simulation. Real detonations.

The shock wave rattled the observation bunker's glass. Leo felt it in his chest. The shields flickered but held. Return fire from the twin cannons tore into the cluster of emplacements. Stone shattered. Obsidian spires cracked and fell. The replica had been built to withstand this kind of punishment, its formations copied as faithfully as Earth's analysts could manage from reconnaissance data. How close it matched the real thing, Leo couldn't say. Close enough to train against. Maybe close enough to die against.

The destroyer advanced. More fire from the Gate. Concentrated barrages from multiple emplacements, the kind of overlapping kill zones that had shredded every flyer squad Leo had followed. Spiritual laser beams cut through the cavern air, leaving afterimages across his vision. The destroyer's shields absorbed it all. And then Leo saw something that made him lean closer to the glass. Figures emerged from hatches along the destroyer's hull. Not flyers. Dummies.

Training mannequins dressed in standard flight suits, launched into the storm of fire on automated platforms. They scattered across the kill zone, drawing fire from the emplacements, creating chaos in the targeting arrays. One dummy took a direct hit. Its flight suit lit up with damage indicators. A flash of spatial distortion. The dummy vanished. Yanked back by a teleportation array. Others followed the same cycle: deploy, take hits, vanish. Leo recognized the technology.

In Flying Aces, after players took too much damage, they would be teleported out and eliminated. The NFL and CFL must have adapted this extraction technology to competition, turning battlefield survival systems into game mechanics. Leo had been using hand-me-down military tech his entire career without thinking about where it came from. Something clicked into place. He had been wondering why the military flyers threw themselves into kill zones so willingly.

They weren't like him, grinding reps to make an NFL roster. They were soldiers preparing for a real assault. Would they be willing to sacrifice their lives in the eventual invasion? Now he understood. In the real invasion, the destroyer would be there. The destroyer was the reason why the flyers ran these drills over and over. It was the reason why the flyers threw themselves into simulated flak without hesitation. During the real battle, the flyers would get teleported back if they got eliminated.

The destroyer closed to within a hundred feet of the western cluster. Its shields were flickering now, the sustained barrage wearing them down. But the twin cannons had silenced half the emplacements, and the dummies were drawing fire from the rest. Leo leaned forward. At this rate, the destroyer would breach the secondary entrance in seconds. Then something punched through the hull. Leo didn't see what happened.

One of the remaining emplacements must have found a weak spot, or maybe a formation had failed at exactly the wrong moment. But a beam of concentrated spiritual energy lanced through the destroyer's midsection, entering starboard and exiting port. Everything stopped. The emplacements went silent. The destroyer's cannons ceased firing. The dummies froze mid-flight. Emergency lights flashed across the cavern. A horn sounded, three short blasts followed by one long.

The destroyer hung motionless, a hole the size of a car punched clean through its center. Smoke curled from the hull. If there had been crew inside, they would be dead. Leo stared at the breach. Twelve emplacements. A single cluster. And the destroyer hadn't made it through. The real Gate had hundreds. An announcement crackled through the loudspeaker.

"Recovery ops in five. All flyers report to staging area three." Leo looked at a nearby flyer and asked.

"Recovery ops?"

"Every piece of debris has to be collected. Spiritual steel doesn't grow on trees." He was already moving toward the exit.

"Go grab some gloves and help out with cleanup duty."

"Cleanup duty" was exactly as tedious as it sounded. Every flyer in the cavern spread out across the battlefield, prying shrapnel from the replica Gate's spires, collecting fragments of spiritual steel from the cavern floor, bringing the debris to the recycling teams. Leo spent half an hour wedged into a crack in the obsidian wall, using a formation-enhanced chisel to extract a chunk of the destroyer's hull plating that had embedded itself six inches deep. He understood why they did it.

High-tier spiritual materials were finite. Earth had exhausted its natural deposits centuries ago. Everything in the modern cultivation economy was recycled, refined, repurposed. Sunshifter's spiritual steel had probably been through a dozen forms before it reached him. Wasting materials wasn't just inefficient. It was existential. By the time they finished, Leo's arms felt like dead weight. He stumbled back to his quarters, collapsed on the cot, and slept through the night without dreaming.

Thursday morning. Back to drills. Leo's zone-reading was sharp now. He stayed alive through full exercise cycles, his positioning clean enough that the military flyers stopped treating him as a liability. When the squad split to create gaps, he split with them. When emplacements rotated to new angles, he read the rotation before the first shot fired. Avoiding those direct hits meant his damage counter finally bottomed out in the mid twenties by Thursday evening. But micrododging remained impossible.

He tried everything. Tighter awareness bubbles. He compressed his Omnidirectional Awareness into a cone barely thirty feet across, hoping the reduced scope would speed up his processing. It didn't. Pre-committed evasion vectors. He picked a direction before each shell detonated and started moving the instant the explosion began, trusting his earlier read to be correct. Progress had stalled. He could diagnose every mistake the instant he made it, but he wasn't improving.

Midway through the afternoon, Leo descended from a drill and sat on the staging platform instead of going to the recovery room. He stared at his hands. Maybe this was actually impossible. Maybe 2. 5 milliseconds still wasn't fast enough. Maybe the research teams had hit the same wall and concluded that no human body could react quickly enough. Maybe the fragment simulation was designed for Gold Core cultivators. The breakthrough to T3 expanded cognition along with spiritual power.

Maybe Leo was chasing something that didn't exist. The thought sat heavy in his chest. But something didn't fit. The Air Force had added fragment simulation to their projectors for a reason. The military didn't waste resources on useless features. Someone was supposed to be able to dodge this. Leo thought about the Apex Flyer. The one arriving Friday. The one that people thought he knew. If anyone had the answers, it would be someone at that level. Leo stood up and walked back to the staging area. One more day.

Friday morning arrived with a change in the cavern's rhythm. Leo noticed it the moment he reached the staging platform. More people than usual. Flyers who normally drilled in separate shifts were gathered together. Technicians had abandoned their equipment bays. Even support staff had filtered onto the observation decks, crowding against the railings for a better view. Someone important was coming. Leo found a spot near the edge of the main platform. Around him, conversations buzzed with anticipation.

"Last time the emplacements couldn't even track the movement. They upgraded the targeting arrays just for this."

"Think we'll actually see anything? Last demonstration was over in eight seconds." Leo kept his attention on the far end of the cavern, where a secondary staging platform had been cleared. The Gate replica's emplacements were rotating to face it, their targeting arrays powering up. A ripple of attention moved through the crowd. Someone was walking across the secondary platform. Leo couldn't make out details at this distance. Black flight suit. Black helmet with a mirrored visor that hid the face beneath.

No insignia. No rank markers. Nothing that identified the flyer as anything other than a silhouette. The Apex flyer pulled out a sword and lifted off. The Gate's emplacements opened fire with live rounds. The first salvo screamed toward the secondary platform. Concentrated flak from a dozen turrets, the kind of overlapping kill zone that would shred any normal flyer in milliseconds. The figure in black moved. Leo almost missed it. One moment the flyer was stationary on the platform.

The next moment the flyer was fifty feet to the left, then a hundred feet higher, then cutting back at an angle that should have been impossible. Zig-zag. Sharp vector changes. Momentum bleeding at every turn. Leo recognized the pattern. The sharp vector changes, the zig-zag cuts that bled momentum at every turn. The way the flyer never committed to a single flight path, always repositioning, always adjusting. It was Omnidirectional Awareness. His signature skill that allowed him to dominate the collegiate league.

But Leo had never seen anyone fly like this. The flyer was faster. Much faster. Moving at speeds that should have been impossible given air resistance. The atmosphere wasn't slowing the flyer down. Somehow the drag that limited every other flyer in this cavern simply didn't apply. Leo filed that away. Whatever technique reduced drag, he needed it. And the flyer was casting while evading. Spell arts flowed from the sword in continuous streams. Blade projections cut through the air.

Defensive barriers flickered into existence for fractions of a second. Qi pulses disrupted incoming trajectories. All of it simultaneous. Awareness, evasion, and offense layered on top of each other. And then Leo saw it. The flyer crossed a blast radius. Shrapnel sprayed outward from a detonation maybe thirty feet away. The flyer slipped between them. Not zone avoidance. Not pre-positioned escape routes.

The flyer was inside the kill zone, surrounded by fragments on all sides, and somehow threading through the gaps between them. Micrododging. It was possible. The flyer was doing exactly what Leo had been trying to do for three days. Reading fragment trajectories in real time and moving his or her body to avoid them. The execution was so clean that it looked effortless, like the flyer could see the gaps before the explosion even happened. Leo watched closely and tried to figure out what the flyer was doing.

The timing. The vector choices. The way the flyer's weight shifted a fraction of a second before each direction change. The subtle movements that preceded each micrododge, so small they would have been invisible without divine sense to track them. The flyer reached the first emplacement. One strike. The turret shattered. Stone and spiritual steel exploded outward, and the flyer was already moving toward the next target, weaving through the debris like it was standing still. Eight seconds. Twelve seconds.

The emplacements fell one after another. Twenty seconds. The Gate's outer defenses were silent. The flyer descended to the secondary platform and disappeared into the facility. A murmur ran through the crowd. People began dispersing back to their stations. The demonstration was over. Leo stood frozen on the platform. His mind raced through possibilities, angles of approach, questions he needed to ask. The flyer had cracked the problem Leo was struggling with.

"Chen." An officer stood at the edge of the platform. Standard uniform. No name Leo recognized.

"Follow me."

"Where are we going?" The officer was already walking.

"The Apex Flyer wants to meet you." Leo fell into step behind him. The Apex Flyer. The one who'd just flew through live ordnance like it wasn't there.

"Who is it?"

"Elia Manning." Leo stopped. Elia Manning. Two-time Super Bowl MVP. Led the Giants to their last championship in 2012 and retired in 2020 to pursue Gold Core advancement. Her portrait was a permanent fixture at the Giants' training facility, a face he passed every single day on his way to practice.

"Coming?" the officer called from the corridor. Leo followed.