Chương 65: Battle of Attrition

The day after the exams, command officially declared a day off. The schedule was relaxed, and the barracks were once again allowed to sleep in all the way until breakfast. Still, nobody felt like lying around for long. The nervous hangover from the tests drove everyone toward the washrooms, and from there, barely having brushed our teeth, we drifted outside into the fresh air. At the fork where the paths from the men's and women's residential sectors met, a wooden bulletin board stood tall.

For an entire month it had been an eyesore of perfect emptiness, but today a fresh sheet of paper, still smelling of printing ink, was pinned to it. The final results. The document's structure was brutally simple, following the finest traditions of military bureaucracy. Along the left side ran a vertical list of surnames. Across the top were four subject columns: physical training, xenobiology, S-Armor piloting, and general terminology. At each intersection sat a marker: either a green checkmark or a bold red X.

The contract terms were strict. Collect a full set of checkmarks, and you were expected to pack your bags before dinner and take your seat on a service bus. Get even a single X, and you stayed in camp until the retest. I had a perfect row of green. The exact same picture appeared next to Mary's name. Predictably. From the start, we had looked like two system errors here: one too old for this sandbox, the other too young. It only made sense that the filter would push us out of the teenage camp first.

"You're kidding me!" Ted let out a wounded groan as if someone had burned a winning lottery ticket right in front of him.

"I was one damn mark away from freedom!"

"You failed theory. Stop wasting time on video games, spend a couple of hours reviewing communication codes, and your bus'll be here tomorrow," Nick cut him off in the dry, emotionless tone of a man dealing with bigger problems.

"I've got a double failure: physical training and piloting. I'm stuck here for at least four weeks."

"In that case, I'll be lucky to get out of here by Christmas," Louise muttered gloomily. The three red markers beside her name left little room for optimism. I ran my eyes over the neat line of green marks in the xenobiology column once more and found myself smiling. Everyone had passed Selina's subject. Every single person. For all her difficult and arrogant personality, she had performed flawlessly as an instructor.

Mary, standing slightly apart from the crowd, gave a brief snort that practically said, "Well, obviously," turned on her heel, and headed back toward the barracks to pack her gear. The remaining trio sank even deeper into misery, as though someone had just canceled their summer vacation. I had to step in and drag them back from fantasy to reality.

"Don't get your hopes up, guys." I folded my arms across my chest, drawing three pairs of gloomy eyes toward me.

"Getting out of here isn't a ticket to the beaches of Miami. The real training hasn't even started yet."

"What do you mean?" Ted blinked in confusion.

"I thought it was pretty straightforward. Camp's over, then maybe a couple of portal deployments a year, and the rest of the time you just enjoy life." I looked at Nick and Louise. They were silently broadcasting the exact same childish expectations. Apparently their personal handlers, unlike Danny, had preferred to keep their trainees in the dark until the very end.

"This camp only gave you a basic crash course," I explained calmly.

"The purpose of this place is to make sure that if an emergency mobilization happens, you don't shoot yourself with your own weapon in the first five minutes and you know which way to point a radio. The real specialization process and serious training begin the moment you walk through the front gate. Even if you're assigned to assault cleanup teams, you'll spend months training under completely different methods.

It's physically impossible to turn yesterday's high school student into an elite soldier in thirty days. No sane commander would send you into a serious sector looking like this."

"Oh, hell. More textbooks." Ted sighed dramatically, though the bitterness had already faded from his voice, replaced by weary acceptance.

"So how long does this marathon last?"

"Depends on where you're assigned and what tasks the analytics division gives you," I replied evasively. I did not know the exact timeline myself, but the therapeutic effect had been achieved. The teenagers quieted down, and their dull despair gave way to genuine, adult contemplation. In the cafeteria, I had barely finished my breakfast when Sam predictably approached me. Honestly, I was surprised he had not been waiting outside the residential block at dawn. The guy's enthusiasm was relentless.

"Tom, you passed! I never doubted you for a second!" he announced immediately with a powerful burst of optimism.

"So, exams're done. You ready to head out?"

"One hour. At the dojo entrance," I replied, checking my watch. That gave my breakfast more than enough time to settle and left a comfortable margin for a final technical inspection. I headed down to the underground storage sector, to the personal S-Armor lockers, and turned the key in the lock. Inside, suspended on a hydraulic mount, waited my new modified suit configuration. An additional air tank and a second mount for a heavy pistol. This was not a blind deployment.

The moment Selina had delivered the container several days earlier, I had put the equipment through a full series of tests, tuning the servos to my physical parameters and acclimating my body to the shifted center of gravity. I arrived at the dojo exactly on time, fully equipped and secured down to the last buckle. Compared to me, Sam, standing motionless on the porch in a spotless white cotton gi, looked like someone who had somehow wandered in from an old martial arts movie.

The historical contrast did nothing to dampen his mood, though. The guy was grinning from ear to ear, clearly looking forward to a good fight. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Since I'm obligated to be a pain in the ass, I should probably clarify one thing." I stopped a couple of steps away from him.

"You won't have any problems with command over an unauthorized S-Power activation?"

"Relax, Tom. Everything's been approved at the highest level." Sam waved the concern away confidently.

"I personally settled it with Colonel Simpson. More than that, he's genuinely interested and promised to watch from the stands himself. Hell, once I switch on S-Power, the entire camp's gonna come running to see it." He slapped his fist into his open palm, restoring everyone's access to S-Power. The very same second, I activated [Enemy Analysis], focusing on the only thing that mattered: his reserve.

S-Power: 19840/19840 [Control Level: Supreme] Two weeks had passed since the last scan, and the stubborn bastard had somehow managed to push his energy ceiling even higher. Despite being stuck in the instructor grind at this camp, he had kept training himself into the ground. His physical stats were just as impressive: Strength: 7 Endurance: 8 Agility: 8 After years of observing other people, I had noticed a pattern. Eight was the natural limit of the human body.

Anything beyond that belonged in the realm of Olympic gold medals and Guinness World Records. Special Skill: [Territory] [Territory: a superpower that allows the user to impose a localized prohibition within a designated area. All objects inside the zone are compelled to obey the restriction. The ability is subject to strict limitations on both range and the cooldown required to establish a new rule.] Interesting.

Since it would take another five minutes or so for the staff and cadets to gather, I decided to use the downtime for a little reconnaissance.

"Sam, you do realize your superpower's completely transparent to me now, right?" I asked quietly.

"Selina mentioned your latest upgrade in passing." Sam frowned for a second as he processed that, then immediately flashed a predatory grin.

"Where're you going with this, Tom? Think I can quietly slap a ban on visual perception and blind you in the middle of the fight?" That possibility had not even crossed my mind, but I did not get the chance to interrupt him. The master had apparently decided to volunteer the technical details.

"Sorry to disappoint, but a zone can only maintain one rule at a time," he explained, rolling his neck.

"And creating a new zone takes at least twelve hours of intense concentration. So there's no way I can cheat or reconfigure it on the fly during a fight." I nodded silently. I had never intended to accuse him of cheating, but without realizing it, Sam had filled in an important gap in my analysis. Now it was obvious why someone with such a devastating ability could not simply walk into a portal and switch off the S-Power of every alien bastard with a snap of his fingers.

The setup and attunement process took far too much time. During that delay, any competent opponent would have plenty of opportunity to regroup and turn him into a stain on the wall. Before long, the training ground in front of the dojo was packed to capacity. Apparently everyone with a free moment had shown up, from off-duty security soldiers to kitchen workers. Off to one side sat Selina, comfortably settled into her folding chair. Sam stepped into the center and raised his voice.

He was speaking to me, but loudly enough for everyone to hear.

"Resource depletion match. Main engagement in the air. Let's go!" With that, he shot straight upward and planted himself on an invisible step. Not wasting a second watching him, I followed. Jagged zigzags. Sudden evasions. Dense snap-fire volleys. Each of us was trying to catch the other off balance and force our own tempo onto the fight. The problem with this style of aerial maneuvering was a hard physiological limitation. The human body simply could not produce bursts of acceleration forever.

It was similar to the forces on extreme amusement rides. Before every new maneuver, the vestibular system needed time to stabilize or you would end up vomiting. Even a highly trained person at peak condition could manage no more than three consecutive bursts. Sam had just reached that limit and paused briefly to regain equilibrium. But I had crossed the limits of an ordinary trained human a long time ago. I executed a fourth burst and swept behind him at full speed. Pistols appeared in both hands instantly.

I opened fire, producing such a dense stream of shots that the sound merged into a single machine-gun roar. Naturally, Sam reacted in time. A transparent energy shield flared around his body. But physics could not be cheated. The barrier began devouring his internal energy at a furious rate as it compensated for the kinetic force of my impacts. As an experienced master, Sam instantly recognized how bad his position was.

He simply disengaged from the invisible step and dropped like a stone, escaping my line of fire while trying to preserve what remained of his reserves. The strategy was sound, but far too predictable. Did he really think I would give him time to recover? I triggered a fifth burst, caught up to him in freefall, and hovered directly above him. The relentless barrage from above never stopped for a second until Sam slammed into the ground with a heavy impact.

A dense cloud of dust and gray soil exploded upward from the point of impact, completely obscuring visibility. I kept methodically pumping rounds into the gray haze. [Tactical Mode Activated] The world froze. Colors lost their vibrancy, and time itself came to a halt, lifting my consciousness above the battlefield. A surprise counterattack? I spun my field of view through a full three hundred sixty degrees and immediately spotted Sam's silhouette.

He was twenty yards away from the area I had been bombarding and had already launched a powerful energy blast from his fist, aimed directly at my back. Just like in his fight against Mary, he had used tunneling and displacement. There was still plenty of time left before [Tactical Mode] expired, and I was not short on energy, so I took a moment to check his current losses. S-Power: 17210/19840 Impressive. In barely a minute, I had burned through more than three thousand points.

Energy shields were not a miracle solution. They were merely a temporary reprieve. If someone cornered you and maintained proper fire density, you would not last long no matter how much energy you had. I smoothly shifted my footing, setting the trajectory for a reverse burst, while simultaneously bringing both hands behind my back and crossing the pistols. The shots would have to be released with precisely calibrated millisecond timing. Time resumed its normal flow.

My first shot, fired blindly along a ballistic arc, smashed Sam's incoming projectile out of the air with a devastating impact. The second round followed along a clean trajectory, reached its target unimpeded, and drove the instructor into the ground once again. Without giving him even a fraction of a second to regroup, I was already diving after him, resuming the hurricane of gunfire and burning another couple thousand points from his reserves.

Somewhere below, near the edge of the training ground, spectators were shouting themselves hoarse, but the thunder of the battle drowned out every word. It did not matter. If something truly critical happened, the soldiers would contact me directly through the helmet's built-in radio. Sam burst sideways again, breaking free of the kill zone. The battle of attrition had entered its final stage.