Here we go, folks! I hope you enjoy this one.

-Plum

26 – Hungry Wolves

When they reached the gym, Hector wasn’t surprised to see a group of mean-faced men looking his way. They were dressed for exercise. Some had body language that was more guarded than others, but none of them looked happy. He looked over the four men, determined that none were a threat, and shifted his attention to Grover Sparling, who was standing slightly closer, smiling jovially. He wore a pale gray suit with a striped blue shirt, and an old-style cigarette smoked between two of his fingers.

“There he is!” Sparling said, waving the cigarette-toting hand at Burton—and everyone else.

“Grover, you old bear! Smoking in my gym?”

“Yours, is it?” Sparling laughed and inhaled deeply from the filtered end of the thing.

“It’s the stink, Grover,” Burton groused. “We work hard in here!”

Sparling waved a hand dismissively. “All the more reason to suffer some fumes! Do you want to raise up fighters or opera singers?” He shifted his attention away from Burton and looked over the rest of the group. “Welcome, Lady Ventress. Hector, it’s good to see you haven’t been wasting time. I swear you’re a dozen centimeters taller than the last time we met!” After they locked eyes and Hector nodded at him, Sparling put his cigarette in his mouth, and then looked at Iris, talking around the thing, “Come here, then. Give me a hug, girl.”

“Father,” Iris said, hurrying over to him. She put her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his chest as he gently patted her shoulders.

“There we go. Enough of that.” He didn’t have to repeat himself; Iris scurried back to stand beside Gladia, and Hector didn’t miss how she didn’t make eye contact with her father. Sparling cleared his throat and said, “Well, Lady Ventress, I’m sure you’ve much to discuss with me, but I wanted to introduce this little team of fighters to Hector. Do you mind?”

“By all means,” Gladia said. “I came along for just that reason.”

“Good.” Sparling nodded, turning to face the line of dour-faced men. “We’ll start from the top and work our way down. We keep things competitive around here, so nobody gets complacent with their ranking.” He pointed to the first man, who was about two meters tall, ruddy-faced with a flat nose and heavy brow. Hector didn’t see any overt chrome on him. “I won’t waste everyone’s time with full names. Bastian is our current rank one, so he’s got one of my three Games entries.”

The big man grunted and flexed his left arm, making his impressive biceps bulge.

Grover pointed to the next man. “Number two and the current holder of my second Games slot: Chago.” Chago, a shorter, wider man with a metallic skull implant and red, glass-like eyes, held up both fists and growled, showing off sharp metal teeth.

Looks like a bodybuilder. Looks slow.

“Number three—no, no—” Grover looked at Hector and winked. “I guess you’re number three, Hector, being as you took my third Games slot.” He laughed, and Hector watched as the arrayed fighters, especially those lower in Sparling’s hierarchy, glowered. “So this is number four, Art, or as the announcers call him, Art the Axe. You’ll learn why.” The man he pointed to was taller than Hector, and leaner, too. He had an enormous, fan-like mohawk, and other than high-end optics, he appeared to lack cybernetics.

“Finally, I kept this man here because he’s a hell of a technical fighter—Kant.” Grover pointed to the only man who looked relatively calm—average build, youthful face, but eyes that told Hector he’d been around for a long, long time.

“Well,” Sparling said, “here he is, boys, your competition, Hector Valerius.”

Hector sniffed, once again letting his gaze drift over the other fighters. He knew what Sparling was doing. He wanted to rattle his cage a little—let him know that he wasn’t the only option when it came to the Games. It was all a show as far as Hector was concerned, necessary only in Sparling’s mind because he didn’t really know Hector. Even Gladia understood that much.

“Is all that necessary, Grover? I’m sure Hector and Burton have plenty they could work on without the hyenas yapping over the kill.”

Sparling laughed, dragging on his cigarette. “Lady Ventress, I’m impressed! Was that a reference to the Old Earth veldt? Well, true, we have our lion picked, but these men are better than hyenas or jackals—if you’re familiar with the term—no, I’ve got a handful of my own hungry wolves, here, and I’m not a man to put all his eggs in one basket.” He chuckled and threw his butt to the ground, grinding it with a polished boot heel. “Apologies for the mix of metaphors.”

“Well,” Burton said, stepping forward. “Should I get these boys to work? We’ve got a few others I can work into the routine, but for today, I think I’ll do some assessments.”

Sparling nodded, waving his hand. “I’ve had my fun. Lady Ventress? Shall we head up to the house?”

The question signaled a break in the tension and a shift of control from Sparling to Burton. As Gladia and the two Sparlings left the gym, the coach got to work, barking orders, and Hector forced himself into the proper mindset to deal with the scenario. In short, he made himself a soldier again and followed orders.

Burton worked them hard, though nobody used any aura, and as he’d promised, it was mostly about setting baselines for strength, speed, endurance, and flexibility. The gym had an extensive selection of strength training machines, and by the end of the day, Hector’s limbs, despite his ability to regenerate, felt like limp noodles. He knew his regeneration had limits; he’d found that out with Lux, but he hadn’t expected to find those limits by lifting weights. It turned out that pushing large muscle groups to failure a hundred times was as exhausting as regrowing cartilage, muscle, and flesh.

Unfortunately, the exhaustion was compounded by his aura system pushing his advancements; it hit him harder than any of the previous levels, to such a degree that most of the next day was lost to him. He remembered waking in the afternoon, ravenous, and realizing that he was on an IV drip. Sass and Lemon had been there, and they’d brought him food. While he ate, Burton and Sparling came to talk to him, both concerned that there was something wrong.

When Hector explained the level-up, Burton had nodded along, but Sparling had been skeptical, saying, “But you’re still low level.”

“It’s a hungry archetype,” Hector replied.

Sparling looked at Burton, who nodded.

“He explained it to me on the ship. His aura system doesn’t play around. You’ll see.”

“Hmm.” Sparling rubbed his chin. “So you gain a lot with each level?”

Hector didn’t say yes, but might have nodded slightly as he yawned. Despite sleeping for eighteen hours, he was feeling another wave of fatigue. “I’ll be done tonight.”

Sparling left without another word, but Burton sat with Hector for a while, talking about his plans for simulated Games events. He showed Hector some footage from some sparring matches between Freddy and the others in Sparling’s “stable.” Freddy held his own for a while, but each of the others ended up thrashing him, and when the drone footage revealed that people were watching, Hector felt a little sorry for the kid.

“He take it okay?”

Burton leaned close, grinning. “Getting his ass whooped by a bunch of low-born mongrels?” He shook his head, chuckling. “It was fine, but I know he wished that girl of yours wasn’t watching—or his mother.”

“What about Flint? He give you any trouble?”

“Only a little beforehand. He wanted to talk to the boys and make sure they knew where to draw the line—and that there’d be hell to pay if they forgot.”

Hector nodded, yawning. Even as he tried to look at Burton, dark shadows closed in on him, and he felt impossibly heavy, as though he’d sink through the mattress. “I’m fading,” he muttered.

“Tomorrow, then,” Burton said, clapping him on the knee. “Be ready to run.”

###

Hector ran, his feet crunching through the loose top layer of Martian dirt and gravel. The five biggest cities on Mars were inside Valles Marineris, the most heavily terraformed region on the planet. Though Sparling’s ranch lay well south of the Trench, it was close enough to have benefited from those efforts. A thousand years of rain, greenbelt propagation, and seasonal runoff had all contributed to making the soil under Hector’s feet significantly different from what the first settlers had experienced.

Those were the kinds of thoughts that intruded on his attempts to concentrate on more important matters—his plans to survive the next few months. It was easy to zone out while running for hours at a time; Burton hadn’t been lying about the heat suit or the weighted vest, and he certainly hadn’t lied about the running. When he’d awakened, his aura system was finished with its conditioning.

His body was mostly recovered, so Burton didn’t have any qualms about putting him to work. He’d brought over the heat suit, the weighted vest, and messaged him a seventy-kilometer running route—a map he could put on his AUI. When the gruff trainer had walked away, he’d given Hector simple instructions: leave after breakfast and be back before dinner.

It sounded like a lot, and in his old life, in his old body, Hector wouldn’t have enjoyed a run like that, even at the end when he’d been properly Praetorian-grade. His current corpus vivum was different. Paul Chevalier had been born to run, with long legs and big, efficient lungs, but the things Hector and Evie had done to his body were something else. It wasn’t just that Hector’s regeneration made him particularly difficult to tire, but his adaptability seemed to work on temporary stresses like the damn heat suit—he hardly felt it.

So he ran, and he thought, and he wondered what the point of it all was. Sure, it was good to be healthy, but Hector was already there. When he’d said as much, Burton had smiled smugly and reminded him that everyone ought to know their limits. That look, though, had been a giveaway; Hector was perceptive, and he knew Burton had other ideas in mind; the old coach was planning something.

“No luck?” he asked, finding conversation perfectly comfortable as his AUI displayed his forty-first kilometer rolling by.

//Plenty of luck, just too much of it. Loyal’s family, employees, and frequent acquaintances make up a massive list. If I isolate the youthful males with a known history of combat expertise, I can pare the list down to around fifty individuals, but—//

“But we don’t know that Lucien kept his old look. If he were really trying to reinvent himself, he might be in a female corpus vivum by now.”

//Two hundred years is a long time.//

“Something I’ll have to bring up with Gladia. I’m still trying to think of a good opening—a good reason for why I didn’t already tell her there was a mole close to Loyal.”

//You were feeling her out—verifying facts. Just because Balus told you something didn’t mean you trusted him. You could feign surprise, act as though you thought Mae would have informed her about your conversation with Balus.//

“Balus had locked Mae out of there, though—Gladia will know that. The truth is, I was being selfish. Lucien is mine, and I—”

//Still, it’s a good—//

Shh. Evie recognized the “tone” of Hector’s thought and stopped speaking immediately. Something had moved on the canyon wall to his left—something that triggered Hector’s subconscious state of awareness. Flicking his mind back over the movement without turning his head toward it, he knew why: one of the shadows had briefly stretched into something person-shaped.

As soon as he realized that, his subconscious told him it was an attack, and it was coming from more than one direction. Hector made a split-second decision. Some people might have started running faster. Some might have turned and run the other way. There were those who would have frozen up, paralyzed briefly as they thought of the right move. Hector wasn’t one to run or freeze. He turned, focused on the split in the ridge where he’d seen the shadow, and used Ghost Leap.

As a crimson rift ripped him out of the universe, and as he poured like quicksilver through the veil, Hector summoned his Aura Blade. By the time he emerged, a bare second later, at his destination, his crimson weapon was flaring to life in his hand. He’d traversed thirty meters of space, most of it vertical, and when he came out on the ridge behind the clump of rust-colored boulders, he was right behind the person who’d been watching him.

To his credit, he felt Hector emerge, or maybe he saw him disappear and jumped to the only plausible conclusion. He turned, his body flaring with a golden aura, but it was too late; he was too slow. Hector knew who he was from the shape of his shoulders and the rich golden hue of his aura; he knew, but he didn’t hold back. Life was full of hard lessons, and it wasn’t the first time Hector had been tapped to play the teacher.

Chago gasped and cried out as Hector’s Aura Blade took his right arm off at the elbow. Then, he truly screamed as Hector released the blade, grabbed Chago’s flailing left arm, and pulled, applying counterforce with his knee as he twisted. The bones and tendons stretched and popped. Chago flopped onto his stomach, trying to go with the twisting motion to spare his poor limb, and then Hector fell on him, releasing the arm to smash an elbow into the base of the man’s skull, rendering him unconscious.

It was over in three seconds, and then Hector activated his new ability—Veil Stalker. His aura system’s level-up results had been fruitful. He’d woken to a level-eighteen report indicating an additional twenty-five aura in his pool, another four added to his Strength attribute, three to his Speed attribute, and two to his already immense Vitality. He’d have been happy with just those gains, but the merger of Shadow Stalk and Ghost Reaver had been the icing that made the cake worth eating.

//Veil Stalker – Slip into the veil, phasing out of physical space as you hunt your prey. While apart from the physical realm, you can still see and move through it at an enhanced rate. Physical attacks cannot affect you, though aura effects can still reach you. Spend aura to briefly breach the veil with an aura construct. Cost: 1 aura per 2 seconds. Construct breach: 30 aura per breach.//

In other words, he could remain in the veil for minutes at a time, and if he wanted to slash someone with his Aura Blade, it would cost him thirty aura per strike. It was expensive, but nothing he couldn’t work with.

As he glided through the twilight realm of the veil, looking down into the gully through which he’d been running, he saw his other ambushers. They’d heard their comrade’s screams, and they were trying to flank Hector’s position—well, the position where he’d been.

Not there anymore, boys.

With that thought, Hector jumped off the embankment, gliding through the strange, blue-gray realm of the veil. As he flew, he summoned his Aura Blade and then pushed another thirty aura into it. The knife, subdued by the weird light of the veil, suddenly flared bright crimson and ripped through into physical space.

Hector’s crimson blade came out of nowhere, aimed to sever the man’s spine just above his hips. A flickering, silvery-gray shield of aura appeared almost immediately in the air, deflecting the worst of the blow so that the other fighter escaped with just a centimeter-deep gash along his side.

Art jumped forward, rolling as he held out his hand, summoning more of that smoky aura, beginning to form his own blade. At that moment, Hector learned why Art was called “Art the Axe.” Hector’s crimson blade became muted again, slipping back into the veil, and he contemplated another sneak attack. Watching the smoky gray hatchet take shape in Art’s hand, though, he thought better of it; he wanted to match blades with the lanky fighter.

Hector canceled the flow of aura to his Veil Stalker ability and squared off with the other man, circling him in a fighting stance. He was still aware of the third ambusher; he’d seen him further up the trail, working around the ridge to try to flank his former position. He didn’t think he’d need to worry about him for several seconds.

“Tricky fucker, aren’t you?” Art asked as his hatchet finally finished taking shape.

Hector smiled, advancing. He saw the smoky gray aura flash around Art, perceived the minute flexes of his tendons and the twitch in the corner of his eyes, and knew that the man was activating a speed boost. Still, Hector waited. When Art came at him, it was smooth and fast, and it might have been deadly if not for Hector’s experience. The hatchet ripped the air, swooping down and then up in a flowing X.

Hector was almost a match for Art’s speed without a boost, but not quite. Still, he was close enough to use his long knife and a backward step to avoid the two blows. Art kept coming, a whirlwind of elegant cleaves, and Hector kept defending, measuring his foe. Clattering rocks told him the third ambusher had discovered their clash and was coming to join the fun. Hector summoned his Ghost Blade to keep him busy.

A surge of aura told him the third ambusher—Bastian, Sparling’s number one—wasn’t going to get close before he tried to end things. Hector focused on a spot up the trail and used Ghost Leap again, vacating his position just as a torrent of bright blue aura tore the ground to shreds.

“Watch it!” Art screamed, diving to the side as Hector’s Ghost Blade reached Bastian. A single glance told Hector the big man had his hands full.

Hector stalked toward Art, who’d spun to face him. This time, when the axe wielder came at him, Hector pushed five aura into a Speed Boost and stopped fighting defensively. To his credit, Art stood against him for several seconds, matching his ferocity, but Hector had seen his moves; he knew how he extended his arm and exposed his shoulder when he performed an outside, downward hack. Hector pressed him hard, attacking his left side, waiting for the man to do it.

When Art saw Hector’s knife dart out toward his hip, he tried to capitalize, hacking down in a swooping hack, but Hector had simply feinted. He stepped left and brought the knife up, clipping the man’s hand off at the wrist. The hatchet broke apart in a cloud of gray steam, and Art gasped, stumbling back.

“Devil damn it! I yield!” Bastian screamed, desperately backpedaling, trying to fend off Hector’s Ghost Blade with a crackling blue aura shield that seemed to be affixed to his wrist. “Get this fuckin’ thing off me!”

Suddenly, a buzzing whir filled the air, and a drone swooped down out of the pale blue sky. Burton’s voice crackled from a speaker. “Okay, Hector! You win, dammit. Cut the poor bastards some slack before you do something the autosurgeon can’t fix.”