Codename: Freedom - Book 5 - Chapter 8

As I waited for everyone to show up for our Combat Development Team meeting, I went over in my head the many times Krato had swooped in from above. His speed, mastery of angles, and the almost unlimited number of possibilities the Ekseliksi’s movement ability allowed for in the right environment left me dazzled. I would’ve likely cheered him on if each of his approaches hadn’t left me limbless or dead.

“You’re not supposed to be happy about dying over forty times in less than an hour,” Destiny rebuked. She appeared in this simulation world that belonged to us. This was the mature version of her in a flattering ballistic suit with her blond hair back in a ponytail. She was fiercely beautiful.

I hadn’t noticed my grin until it widened at her words. “Hey, I was starting to get the hang of it at the end there. You got a reading on his speed and technique so you can add it to the game you made, right?”

“You think it’s just a game? Yeah, I got it. I’m starting to think you really do like pain.”

“Nah. He just killed me fast enough that I didn’t feel much.”

One side of her face curled up in a snarl as a bat with the word Idiot written down its length appeared in her hand. It was an oversized representation. Then she attacked. When the bat struck, I didn’t feel it, but it rebounded as if it actually hit me. Instead of feeling its impact, I hear a loud, “Idiot!” sound from the bat. She proceeded to hit me repeatedly.

Once she was playing at being winded, I strolled over and hugged her.

She squirmed, but if she really didn’t want it then she wouldn’t have let me embrace her in the first place. She could also break the laws of physics and phase through me at will.

I ran my hand down her hair saying, “There, there.”

Hwan ported in then of all times. He saw what was going on, so the Korean American rushed over and sandwiched Destiny between us in a group hug.

She screeched in delight.

I thought for a moment she was going to accuse us of something inappropriate when I saw her close her eyes as if savoring the moment as long as it lasted. It sobered me quickly. The Destiny that had been there when Hwan was still St3alth and we were looking to break into the professional gaming scene wasn’t the same existence as she was today. At the same time, she’d gone back and scanned her memories, reliving them. It was like the AI we’d grown up with had been a ghost of her real self and only now was the person really here.

While I was beginning to grasp the significance of the moment and Destiny was cherishing it, Hwan couldn’t help himself. “You know what would be funny? If Destiny farted.”

Like a ghost, the blond AI disappeared from our grasp only to reappear above and behind Hwan with the idiot bat. She unleashed on him. “I do NOT Fart!”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Hwan said with a shrug.

Mara the tawny leotard wearing rhythm dancer ported in with the redheaded vixen who had tormented many guilds in Freedom. Heather and Mara had been discussing something when they both froze at the scene.

Technically, Hwan and I were no longer embracing even if we were standing abnormally close while Destiny was bonking him over the head with an overly large bat.

 Not one to miss an opportunity to charm two beautiful ladies, I said as I waved, “Did you know drones don’t fart?”

As the idiot bat moved from Hwan to my own head, I gave them a large grin.

Heather just blinked before turning back to Mara and continued where she left off.

The cringe that Marabella desperately tried to disguise with a smile was her only reaction before she replied to her friend.

Hwan and I shared a knuckle bump as if we’d actually succeeded at something then I asked, “How’s stealth training?”

In the beginning, I’d tried to make the Combat Development Team’s meetings feel official with a firm structure. It had devolved into us all meeting together for the first hour to discuss certain topics and we’d break up into different groups after that to experiment with the many things we were interested in. Despite the casual atmosphere, it worked incredibly well.

For one, Destiny was able to record every word of every conversation and create a database we could all pull from. She was the fabric that added the needed structure we did have. Without her, it wouldn’t have worked. But it was equally the people involved and their sincere desire to improve in a variety of different fields that kept us going.

Harrison showed up almost every session with a new mech or invention of some kind, while Hwan and Handshake focused on stealth and assassin tech while trying to blend it with psionics. Mel, Barrell, and I were usually joined with Kline, a few guys from his crew, Vector, Treetop, and Cornelius as we toyed with different uses of psionics. Layering techniques was still a major focus of ours, but that was such a general category that we could apply it to almost anything.

By the end of the session, many of us just ended up sparring. Kline had got me fully integrated into his grappling program. He was teaching classes in mass a few days a week. He didn’t let me get away with just rolling around with him though. The many psionic abilities added facets to grappling that changed the game forever.

We all had our personal projects we were working on as well. Mel and I took turns throwing Rank E bolts at the newly advanced Kline as he seriously started working on his headbutting technique. The man could tank a Rank E bolt while still at Rank F. Now that he was Rank E, he could take Mel’s overcharged bolt to the face.

I feared the focus on inner walls was limiting his growth in other areas, but when I brought it up, he gave me a pointed look. I didn’t find him in private and straight up ask if he was getting pointers from our Ekseliksi friends. He made it clear enough without having to.

Mel and I spent more time together than we had in a very long time. With his unlocking of every psionic note, I gave him a push here and there to develop what I considered the basics. That included shifting between movement psionics and shielding, movement and attack, movement and a change in rhythm. Our work on psionic layering was helpful, but to master anything you just needed to use them over and over again. So we sparred and drilled.

I generally showed the others any new discovery Destiny and I had made regarding Ekseliksi uses of psionics, but this time I saved it just to show Mel. Now, Destiny had edited the video of Aeneus Raptis attacking me in his environment of choice. He no longer looked the same, and the person being attacked didn’t look like me either.

We were in a separate space within Destiny’s sim when she started playing the disguised video.

After the Krato’s first dive bomb where his physically enhanced hand became a blade that decapitated me, he inhaled a breath and held it that way for a long time until he slowly started to release it. “Was that even real?” he finally asked.

I began to explain how the ground’s high iron content greatly improved the Ekseliksi’s push ability. “This is close to the fastest Rank E psionics is capable of. All we have to do is figure out how to combat this and the rest is easy.”

Mel’s dirty blond hair was kept short. What had once been stubble on his chin had grown into a mature afternoon shadow that only consistent morning razor work took care of. He wore a pale green ballistic suit that had a military vibe. I knew the real reason he chose it was because it didn’t get as hot in the sun as a darker color. He was too caught up in trying to figure it out to jest with me, and he asked, “Psionic shielding?”

When the scene around us changed and the Ekseliksi shot upward at an angle to appear behind his opponent more than two hundred feet above him, we watched as the monstrous man descended, propelling himself with green Rank D psionic push to go even faster.

The target covered himself in silver Rank E psionic force field that was torn through an instant later like a sheet of paper.

“So his attack in invincible against anything under Rank D…” Mel pounder aloud. “So either we’d have to learn to dodge such speed, or surround ourselves with Klines?”

I craned my neck.

The often overly serious Major cracked a grin. “So how?” he muttered. “We’re looking for two solutions. How to sense such an attack, and how to avoid it. If you moved fast enough, sure, you could avoid it, but how many times? And you couldn’t move in just any direction. Choose wrong one time and it’s over.”

“You’re right, but there’s something you’re missing,” I said lightheartedly.

“Which is…”

The Ekseliksi and his opponent disappeared until it was just Mel and me standing there on that rust-covered planet. “You forgot to ask if we could move like he could.”

“We’re Rank E,” he insisted.

“Haven’t you heard the old mantra, ‘And we’ll do it anyways because we’re too young to know any better?’”

Bending over, he rapped his knuckles against the ground. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”

“Not if I have any say in the matter,” Destiny announced as she appeared before us. The idiot bat as resting against her shoulder as an ever-present threat to anyone that dared oppose her.

“We need feedback, dronehead,” I objected anyway.

“Lucius,” she said sweetly. “I will make sure you have all the feedback you need. Don’t make me have Mara lecture you about how you should be trying to have fun with this.”

Mel and I shared a glance.

I shrugged.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “So how do you want to start?”

Tapping my chin, I asked, “Destiny, how high do you think this Krato could push himself into the air?”

She was ready with answers. “He does not use his full power to push himself upward. Instead, he uses a single burst likely to save energy. If he used it to continue propelling himself, I estimate he’d lose momentum to climb higher at approximately half a mile. His limit with the bursts he uses is likely two hundred meters, or an eighth of a mile.”

I let out a shrill whistle. “Okay, that’s a lot more impressive than I thought. So he can more or less fly?”

“You can more or less fly, numbskull. You’re just limited to a few feet off the ground depending on the material the ground is made of. He just has a much higher limit. However, the elevation he can hover at is much lower than his propulsion limit.”

She wasn’t wrong. I remembered VR games I’d played in the past that didn’t have flying but allowed bounding through the world as a form of fast travel. One memory of whole groups of people jumping above a forests canopy only to arch through the air before piercing through that leafy curtain to the ground below before doing it again a dozen strides away. It had been a martial arts fantasy MMO.

“This isn’t exactly something new to us,” I said, looking at Mel.

“The Ekseliksi compound?” he replied, referring to the first Vanguard quarterly event.

“Exactly. You’ve improved a lot since then.”

He nodded to himself as he said, “Without the walls to support our ascent, but… yeah. So what, we just jump?”

“Whoever gets the highest wins.”

“Wins what?”

“I don’t know, dinner?”

“I already owe you a steak,” he said. “I’ll have to have Olivia cook for you. She makes a perfectly medium rare T-bone.

“Which reminds me, especially after how you won the last event, I think you need to start dating, man. You have no idea what it’s like being able to go home to Olivia. Some girls might add to your plate, but not her. It’s not like we have a family or anything, but she makes life easier, not harder. We have a place to escape to where we can forget about our normal problems and just enjoy each other’s company.”

Holding up both hands in surrender, I teased, “I’m jealous, alright. You don’t have to rub it in.”

“Look,” he said, grabbing my shoulder and holding me in place. “All you do is train. There’s a place for that. Even a place for someone as obsessed as we are. But you need that break each day. A time to reset and remember why all this nonsense is worth it.

“Even if you have Destiny parading around in a miniskirt behind closed doors, there’s more to life, man.”

The laugher that welled up inside me was only proceeded by Destiny herself raging with her idiot bat over Mel’s head.

He looked up, allowing her to bash him in the face as he apologized, “Sorry, Destiny. I shouldn’t have used you as an example.”

She landed in front of him with her hands on her hips. With a sigh of finality, she replied, “Fine. You’re forgiven. You’re worried about Mr. Pain is Fun. I get that.”

“You know,” he patted me on the shoulder before letting go. “Olivia has friends and pretty much all of them like you.”

“And you’re sure all of them have the same character as she does?”

His look said it all before he shook his head. “I still can’t believe you’re not pursuing Mara. And I agree with Kline. Heather definitely has a thing for you. I’ve even heard secret rumors that have made their way across the Meta that Mia is crazy about you. You two don’t secretly have kids together, right?”

“Kids? Plural? I met her for the first time like three to four months ago. What have you been reading?”

“You didn’t know? You guys have twins. There was even talk that she was furious because you’d cheated with LeLisa, but that rumor was squashed when the girl appeared in a Russia for some foreign documentary on how different nations were handling the Cube technology.”

“Yeah, not so much.”

“Well, forgive me if Olivia tries to set you up on a blind date in order to agree to cook for you.”

I rubbed at the tension in my forehead. “Then I guess I’ll have to lose.”

“I’ll make sure she tells the girl that you’re not interested in dating. Seriously, though. I’m not exaggerating about her cooking.”

“Let’s get started. I’ll just have Destiny zap her or something if she tries anything.”

Mel snickered. “I won’t tell her you’re only coming for the food.”

“If I win I also get to pick the place.”

“I already owe you a steak. You’re coming over if you want to collect.”

“First Kline, and now you? Whatever.” I pushed him as I forced psionic energy out of my feet. It was incredible how well this environment responded. I pushed myself to the limit of my hover and was between eight or nine feet off the ground.

Any thought about streak and blind dates was forgotten as Mel choked out, “No way.”

My control was enough that my descent back to the ground was smooth. “See you up there,” I challenged. Then without overthinking it, I empowered my legs with psionic strength as I jumped only propelling it downward just as my feet were about to leave the ground.

I’d easily jumped over thirty feet in the past. This wasn’t a new concept. I practiced controlled jumps, propelling myself in directions contradicting my body position, among other things. But to just push myself as high as humanly possible wasn’t something I did often. Especially not straight up just to see how high I could get.

The g-force was unlike anything I’d ever felt. It was like a giant’s hand was pressing down against my head as I launched upward. I knew I’d be going higher than ever before, but not like this. My speed didn’t match Aeneus Raptis’s. Rank E and Rank D psionics were just too far apart. But how hadn’t I known we were capable of such a thing. As I shot past fifty feet in the air, at least, my elation from the physical feat blended with what I felt of the sheer possibilities.

Like a human rocket, I continued to push psionic energy from my feet. It wasn’t enough to allow me to fly, but the same push was enough to slow my decent for air walking.

“How high?” I screamed as I neared the peak of my ascent.

“111 feet,” Destiny’s voice sounded in my head.

Not bad for a first try. As I began to descend, I bent at the waist into a pike position as I got a feel for the air pressure. Only then did I fling my feet upward with a psionic push, driving myself downward as I’d seen Krato do.

I didn’t fly straight. My feet were all over the place. But I had enough control with the experience I had that I was an out-of-control bottle rocket that was weaving chaotically through the air. With the help of gravity and the thrust from push, I hit a speed in a matter of a few seconds that was too sudden to scare me. I was a bug. The ground was a windshield. Instead of splat, I splashed into a blur of rust-colored liquid.

Swimming to the surface, the substance I was in suddenly changed and threw me upward like a trampoline.

I didn’t land. Destiny, already breaking physics, decided she was tired by playing by the same old rules and grabbed me by the shirt. I dangled there in here grasp as she screamed, “What were you thinking?”

In the softest voice I could manage, I replied, “You said you wouldn’t let it hurt.”

With her off hand, she pointed at me. Her index finger was inches from my face. She froze that way.

“You’re mad at me now for believing you?”

She huffed and let me go. It was just in time for us both to look up and see Mel sprawling high in the air.

“97 feet,” Destiny muttered.

Then Mel started throwing psionic bolts all over the place. He laughed as he did. Then he started to fall and cried out in panic.

I sat there for a while just watching as he fell. Destiny made his landing a safe one, of course. My mind was already at work, trying to figure out exactly how we could use this. It was the kind of thing anyone with psionic push could learn, but if the skill wasn’t developed, surviving it would be difficult, let alone doing anything that even resembled Aeneus Raptis’s aerial attack.

More variables were thrown onto the pile of almost infinite possibilities.

Slowly coming to my feet, I let myself relax enough to take advantage of Destiny making things less deadly, and far less painful. It was time to have some fun.