Chương 173: Shall Not Be Infringed

Leo's flight back from London was the most enjoyable eight hours of his life. Business class. Actual business class. The seat reclined into a bed. A real bed, with sheets and a pillow and a blanket that wasn't made of recycled sandpaper. The flight attendant brought him spiritual olives in a ceramic dish. Almost every other flight Leo had ever taken was either government-funded or going straight onto a credit card he was trying not to think about. This time Hilda was picking up the bill.

Leo stretched his legs into the space where a normal seat would have been and decided that he would fly business class for the rest of his life. After he resolved his debt situation. Which was looking increasingly manageable. The Queen Charlotte's Ball had been full of rich young masters from families with more money than they knew what to do with. Once he made his NFL debut, turning a few of those introductions into sponsorships shouldn't be hard. He glanced across the aisle.

Hilda sat with a tablet propped on the tray table, scrolling through something that looked like financial projections. Her posture hadn't changed since takeoff. Six hours of intense concentration, broken only by the occasional note typed with one finger. Leo thought about asking her what was happening with Vicky and Edward. The last time he'd seen them together, they'd been screaming at each other on the ballroom floor.

Then Vicky had asked him cryptic questions about karma threads and walked off toward the prince looking weirdly cheerful. Leo hoped she wasn't strangling him. But asking meant opening a conversation about whether he'd fulfilled his end of any bargains, and some doors were better left closed. The plane touched down at JFK. They collected their luggage, cleared customs, and walked toward the domestic terminal. Leo checked the departure board. Denver was in the opposite direction.

He followed Hilda toward Gate B7, where the screen read BENTONVILLE, AR.

"Hey, Hilda." He caught up to her.

"I thought we were going to train. Why are we flying to Arkansas instead of taking a direct flight to Denver?" Hilda stopped and turned to face him.

"You thought we were going to train with the Denver Broncos?" Leo nodded.

"The Broncos are a professional NFL franchise." Hilda resumed walking.

"There are regulations governing contact between teams and players during the offseason. Mandatory rest periods. Legal frameworks designed to prevent exactly what you're describing."

"So where are we going?"

"The Walton family's private militia training grounds. Northwest Arkansas. We'll land in Bentonville and drive from there." Leo's stride faltered. Private militia. He had heard the term before. Walton guards in yellow and blue had helped staff the checkpoints at Yale during the championship lockdown. At the time he'd accepted it without question. Now the strangeness caught up with him. A retail family with its own army.

"Private army," he said.

"I mean, I know they exist. But a family can just have soldiers? Like, legally? How does that work?" Hilda gave him a look.

"The answer is the Second Amendment. I suggest you look it up." Leo pulled out his phone. He checked Wikipedia. A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Hilda reached over and tapped the screen.

"There." She withdrew her hand.

"Hence we are going to the training grounds of the Walton family militia. Well regulated. Necessary for security. Constitutionally protected." Leo stared at the words. He had always assumed that the Second Amendment was about guns, not private armies. Yet the word 'militia' sat on the screen. Somehow he had a weird feeling the Second Amendment had read exactly the same way in his old world. Hilda began walking toward the gate.

"Every major cultivation family in America maintains a militia. Has since the founding. How exactly did you think we won independence?" Leo had thought the Revolution was mostly about throwing tea into a harbor. Saying that to Hilda felt like a bad idea. He followed her, still processing.

"Leo." Hilda didn't turn around.

"When we land, I'm going to ask you three questions about the Bill of Rights. If you get any of the three wrong, the first day of training doubles." Leo's frowned. He pulled out his phone.

Three hours later, they landed in Arkansas. The drive took forty minutes through rolling hills and dense forest. The roads got narrower. The trees got thicker. Eventually they turned onto a private road marked only by a small brass plaque that read WALTON FAMILY TRUST.

"Victoria asked to bring you here three times," Hilda said, watching the trees slide past.

"During your time in the CFL. She thought our facilities would accelerate your development." Leo looked at her.

"What happened?"

"The family denied the requests." Hilda's tone suggested this should have been obvious.

"The compound's access list has fewer names on it than most holiday cards. Victoria is family. You, at the time, were a high school student with an unusually high divine sense." The car crested a hill. The main compound spread below them. Six training arenas, each the size of a professional Flying Aces stadium. Barracks in orderly rows along the eastern edge. A central command building rising four stories, its roof dense with spiritual arrays that pressed against Leo's senses even from the hilltop.

The formations were layered. He could feel them overlapping, supporting each other.

"The formations protecting this compound were designed by three separate Nascent Soul masters." Hilda said.

"There are perhaps four comparable installations in the South. Two of them belong to the federal government." The car descended toward the main gate. Guards in tactical gear flanked the entrance. Their spiritual signatures read Gold Core, both of them. Superiors pulling gate duty. The car stopped. Hilda stepped out and Leo followed. The nearest one locked onto Leo. Leo felt the man's spiritual pressure flare, a challenge. He was trying to provoke a response. Standard intimidation.

Leo walked past the guard the way he'd walk past a doorman. Behind them, one of the guards glanced at the other. Hilda watched him as they moved through the compound. Whatever she expected to see on his face, she didn't find it. She turned toward the barracks without comment.

"Most of our personnel fulfill their draft obligations here rather than in the federal military." Hilda clasped her hands behind her back.

"The training is more rigorous. The equipment is better. Our casualty rates in Catacombs deployments are a fraction of the national average." A transport vehicle rolled past on the road ahead. Armored chassis, treaded wheels designed for rough terrain. The spiritual flak cannon mounted on its roof swung toward them, toward Leo, and he felt the targeting array settle on his chest. Leo blinked. He felt Sunshifter respond in his dantian, its umbral displacement formation ready to fire.

The shifting ability was literally half the sword's name. He'd owned the weapon for a year and never once gotten to shift. Every time he ran the numbers on recharge costs, his bank account threatened to file for divorce. If a strike landed within range, the formation would teleport him a short distance sideways before impact. The attack would connect with empty air. The gunner recognized Hilda and swung the cannon away. Leo's shoulders dropped slightly.

Looks like he wouldn't get to test out umbral displacement today. Hilda stopped walking.

"Did you just..." She stared at him.

"Were you disappointed?" This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"No."

"You were." Her voice pitched upward.

"A Tier Four flak cannon locked onto your chest and you're upset it didn't fire?" Leo considered his options. Honesty seemed like a mistake. He shrugged. Hilda looked at him for a long moment. The expression on her face suggested she was reconsidering several assumptions about his mental stability. They walked toward the nearest arena. Through the open doors, Leo glimpsed Foundation Establishment cultivators running formation drills.

Blue qi crackled between their positions as they practiced coordinated barrier techniques.

"Our tank division." Hilda pointed toward a massive hangar on the western edge.

"Forty-eight T4 armored vehicles. Each capable of leveling a city block." She looked at him expectantly. Leo nodded.

"That's impressive." It was the wrong tone. He heard it as soon as it left his mouth. Too flat. Too polite. The kind of thing you said when someone showed you their vacation photos. Hilda's eyes narrowed.

"You don't seem impressed." He was trying. He really was. The facility was genuinely remarkable. The formations were sophisticated. The equipment was cutting-edge. Any reasonable person would be awed. But Leo kept thinking about McGuire Air Force Base. The elevator that descended for two full minutes to reach the Gate of Contrition hidden beneath it. The squads of flyers running kill-zone drills around the clock.

The replica built to prepare Earth's forces for an invasion that would determine the fate of civilization. Leo tried again.

"Wow." Somehow it sounded worse. Hilda crossed her arms.

"I understand. The colors offend your sensibilities." Leo blinked.

"The colors?"

"Yellow and blue." She gestured at a passing guard.

"I'm aware of the association. Walmart. Very amusing. I've heard every joke." Leo looked at the guard's uniform. Yellow and blue. The same colors on every Walmart storefront in America. He hadn't even thought about it. His dad had always been a Costco man. Leo couldn't remember the last time he'd set foot in one of Vicky's family's stores. The image surfaced before he could stop it: a Gold Core cultivator in body armor, standing at the entrance of a megastore, waving at customers. Welcome to Walmart.

Leo bit the inside of his cheek. Don't laugh. Do not laugh.

"Something funny?" Hilda's voice could have frozen water.

"That's not..."

"It's fine." Hilda's voice was clipped.

"Mock the family colors. Everyone does."

"I wasn't thinking about the colors."

"Then what were you thinking about?" Leo opened his mouth. Closed it. He couldn't tell her about the Gate of Contrition. He couldn't explain that he had watched an Apex Flyer, a category of flyer that most people believed was a myth, demonstrate techniques that made T4. 5 look like children playing with toys. Hilda stood there, proud of her compound and her tanks and her Tier Four formations, and she had no idea. None at all. She had no idea what the government was actually building.

The worst part was that he couldn't even fake it properly. Every time he tried to look impressed, whatever was on his face just made it more obvious that he wasn't.

"Nothing," he said.

"Really. I'm just tired. Must be the jet lag." Something flickered in Hilda's expression. She was reading him again, processing, and Leo could tell she'd reached a conclusion she didn't like. This kid knew something she didn't. Her jaw tightened.

"Well." Her voice went dangerously pleasant.

"Since our facilities fail to impress you, I suppose I'll have to make up for it with the training." She turned and resumed walking toward the main building.

"We start tomorrow. Five AM. I do hope you're well rested." Leo followed, keeping his mouth shut. He had a distinct feeling he'd just made the next few weeks significantly harder.

The first spar lasted forty seconds. Leo launched from his starting position, Sunshifter screaming through the air in the jagged lightning-bolt patterns that had carried him through high school and the CFL championship. Hilda flew in a wide arc to his left. Leo zagged toward her. The G-force bleeding formation fired, dumping momentum. His vector reversed instantly. Zero to maximum acceleration in a fraction of a second. He closed the distance. Hilda wasn't there.

She'd curved away from his approach, her trajectory a smooth crescent that carried her around his flank. Leo zagged again, bleeding momentum, reversing course to track her new position. He was slower now. The first zigzag had cost him speed. The second cost him more. Hilda's sword caught him across the shoulders before he finished accelerating.

"Dead," she said. Leo hit the training field hard enough to bounce.

By noon, Leo had died fourteen times. The pattern never changed. He dodged. He bled momentum. Hilda carved around his flank and struck him before he could recover. The spars grew shorter as his body accumulated damage and his reactions slowed. Leo lay on the training field, staring at the Arkansas sky. His ribs ached. His shoulders ached. Everything ached. The armor's damage absorption was starting to feel like a suggestion rather than a guarantee. Footsteps approached. Hilda stood over him.

Her hair was still perfect. She wasn't even breathing hard.

"Do you understand the problem?" Leo pushed himself up onto his elbows. He did understand. He'd understood since his first drill with T4 flak, when Henderson had herded him into corners and he'd realized that bleeding momentum left him stationary. Every zag bought him angle. Every zag cost him speed. Hilda wasn't playing the angle game. She was playing the speed game. And she was winning.

"I'm bleeding momentum," Leo said.

"Every time I zag."

"Correct." Hilda clasped her hands behind her back.

"We gave you a remarkable tool. The G-force bleeding formation allows instantaneous vector changes that would kill an unprotected flyer. You can hit angles that shouldn't exist. You can reverse direction faster than the human eye can track." She paused.

"And you are using it constantly. Every turn. Every repositioning. Every single movement you make bleeds momentum because you've decided that's your identity. The flyer who zags. The flyer who can take G-forces that would pulp anyone else." Leo's jaw tightened. She made it sound like vanity. Like he'd been showing off instead of fighting for every win with the only edge he had.

"You don't need to prove to everyone that your sword was touched by Walton formation masters." Hilda's voice was flat.

"The basics matter. Every flyer in this league learned to conserve momentum, to chain turns, to maintain speed through curves. You skipped all of it because you had a toy that let you cheat." She was right. Leo thought about every spar he'd just lost. Hilda flew in ribbons. Continuous curves that never stopped, never reversed. Her speed built through each turn because she wasn't bleeding it away.

When he tried to intercept her, she simply curved around his new position and struck him while he was trying to rebuild momentum. Leo pushed himself fully upright. The words landed harder than Hilda's sword had. He'd spent years proving he was special. Proving he could do things others couldn't. The zig-zag patterns, the impossible angles. And none of it had prepared him for someone who just flew better. Hilda turned toward the center of the training field.

"Watch." She mounted her sword and launched. Her first curve was gentle. A wide arc toward the eastern boundary. Then she tightened the turn, banking harder, her trajectory spiraling inward without ever reversing. Loop after loop after loop. Each turn bled a fraction of her speed. Five percent. Maybe less. The losses were so small that her acceleration between turns more than compensated. She was speeding up while turning.

By the second week, Leo's loops stopped being ugly. The transitions were smoother now. He could chain four or five turns without bleeding significant speed, his trajectory a continuous ribbon that almost resembled Hilda's demonstrations. Almost. She still caught him. Every spar ended the same way. But the spars lasted longer. Two minutes instead of forty seconds. Three minutes. Once, nearly five, before Hilda threaded inside his arc and tagged his shoulder.

"Better," she said. The word felt like a medal. Then she introduced a new problem.

"You burned through a quarter's worth of Tier 4 reserves in two minutes of sparring." Hilda landed beside him.

"The league caps T4 at thirty seconds per quarter. You cannot simply overwhelm opponents with superior firepower. Not anymore." Leo thought about the highlights he'd watched in Niki's film room. Explosive T4 exchanges. Devastating finishing blows. The clips that made it onto ESPN. But highlights weren't the game. The other fifty-eight minutes, flyers fought on T3 qi. A flyer could burn T3 all day without consequence.

The skill was knowing when to escalate, when thirty seconds of T4 would actually decide something, and when burning reserves would only give an opponent something to punish later. Hilda drew her practice blade.

"Today you learn to defend against Tier 4 aggression using only Tier 3 reserves. I will be trying to eliminate you. You will not be allowed to match my expenditure." She launched before he finished processing. The pressure was immediate. Hilda's qi output spiked, and the gap between them closed before Leo finished his first turn. T4 flight was faster, sharper, stronger. Matching it on T3 meant dying on contact.

Leo threw himself into the widest arc he could hold, trading proximity for time, trying to keep enough distance that her angles couldn't reach him. She caught him in four seconds.

"Again."

The weeks blurred into a rhythm. Five AM starts. Hilda waiting on the platform with her practice blade already drawn. Sparring until his qi reserves bottomed out, then film study while he recovered, then more sparring. She broke down every habit he'd built over two years of competition and rebuilt his fundamentals from scratch. The Walton family's T3 reserves were bottomless. Leo burned through more spiritual qi in a single morning session than he'd used in entire CFL matches. Clean energy flooded his meridians.

His divine sense sharpened with each exchange. T4 reserves available whenever Hilda decided to test his limits. By the end of the third week, he stopped thinking about his flight path. Muscle memory handled the mechanics. His conscious mind was free to read the fight. By the fourth week, he could survive T4 aggression on T3 reserves.

Hilda would escalate, her pressure increasing, and Leo would read the shift in her qi expenditure and fall back into defensive patterns that bled her clock without matching her investment. Most sessions, Hilda's T4 pressure cracked him in under thirty seconds. But once, just once, her T4 qi ran out before she could tag him. She nodded at that. A single dip of her chin.

"Acceptable." Every day he improved. And every hour spent burning spiritual qi at high intensity pushed his divine sense a fraction further. The growth was subtle, nothing like the divine sense press, but consistent. This was why formation masters fought for NFL roster spots despite having no business on a flying sword. Decades of combat strengthened perception in ways formation drawing couldn't match.

Four weeks passed. Hilda saw him off at the airport. She watched him check his bag and pull out his boarding pass. When he turned to say goodbye, she spoke first.

"After our first spar, I expected you'd be cut by the second preseason game." A pause.

"The Broncos play the Giants in week seven. I'm already regretting how much I taught you." Leo grinned.

"Thank you. For everything." Hilda gave him one last appraising look, the same look she'd given him that day he'd failed to be impressed by her tanks. Then she nodded, satisfied with whatever she saw, and walked away. He watched her car pull out of the departure lane and merge into traffic. Then he grabbed his bags and headed for home. His NFL debut was in three weeks. A preseason game in Buffalo. Tom had already called him twice about tickets.