Young Defenders Office, Action Room B, Meritas City - September 18th, 2014, 14:30PM

  Artificer technology is so strange.

  That was the first thought that came to my mind as I watched the room we had just been sitting in bleed away like water running down a drain.

  The table? Gone. The chairs? Melting into air. The paint? Deleting itself as we speak.

  I never understood how someone could make something like this. Artificers were the classification of Super that confused me the most; from what I’d heard, they were people who were specialised into making specific kinds of technology, often in a way that seemed to defy any laws of physics.

  And this simulation room was a shining example of an Artificer’s work.

  As the room faded away to a bleach-white, colours began to swirl. Above us, the room shifted into a bright blue sky, a light fading into existence like a sun.

  We could see the ground change, changing into the dark navy and black of well-worn roads and the greys of sidewalks.

  Shapes of buildings, proper skyscrapers, began shaping themselves into existence.

  Within a few seconds, we’d gone from a small and quaint break room with a coffee table, to what looked and felt like a living city street; it even got the smells and the wind right.

  “Geez…” Spitter murmured next to me. “Mr. House wasn’t kidding about this being realistic…”

  I didn’t get much of a chance to take it in, though. In front of us, the centrepiece of our assessment slowly came into focus. It was a skyscraper like many of the others that surrounded us, but it had sustained some nasty damage to its base, with massive gash that was causing it to lean incredibly precariously, like it could topple over any moment.

  Immediately, we could hear the cries of people coming from inside the building. Around the building’s base, we saw the culprits.

  Mechanical automatons, each one standing at about seven feet tall with a dark brass colouration, their bodies made of sleek metal. Each one was humanoid and near-identical save for the scuff marks and dents that you’d expect to see on a machine like this, and placed in the centre of their heads was a single large glowing eye.

  At the base of the building there were about nine of them, each one approaching the building like it was about to start tearing it down.

  I looked up towards the top of the building; in addition to the automatons at the base of the building, several were scaling its side towards other people who were either hanging on for dear life to the building’s outside, or trapped inside. People were on all different parts of the building; some hanging on for dear life, some stuck in collapsed parts of the buildings. One person seemed to be on the roof, precarious as the building leaned.

  An intercom blared to life again, Mr. House’s voice crackling around us.

  “Your objective is simple. Deal with the situation as best as you can: save as many people as possible, neutralise the threat, and work together.”

  As soon as he stopped, it was like a switch flipped. The crowd of automatons in front of us immediately spun, the singular eye in the centre of their heads flaring to life.

  “Spitter and I will head to the trapped survivors.” Sweep shouted, immediately running forward. “You two take care of these robots.”

  Spitter ran after him, trailing behind him. I watched as Sweep took a couple of steps forward, and then the wind suddenly kicked up; it was like a miniature tornado with him as its eye, dust and debris spinning around him. His next step didn’t touch the ground, as the wind carried him into the air.

  I saw Spitter leap into the air, shouting after him as she grabbed onto his boot with one hand, causing him to swear as she caught him.

  I turned my attention to the automatons heading towards us.

  I took a breath, trying to stay calm.

  This was it.

  Time show them what I can do.

  I looked over my shoulder at Leeroy, who just barely caught my eye before nodding at me. I focused, pooling my power into the radius bone of my right arm, just like I’d shown Crucible and Skate.

  The bone erupted from my skin with a wet popping tear, extending into a sharp, pointed spike that extended just past my outstretched arm.

  That’s when I noticed something about this uniform; whatever it was made of, it had made a small and neat opening for my bone to extend through without me having to adjust it.

  Putting that thought to the back of my mind, I immediately shot forward towards the near automaton, scanning it and trying to see if I could see any weaknesses.

  Joints? Too small.

  The big eye? That'd work, blind it, or knock out its brain.

  I stopped in front of the first one, jabbing with my right arm and sending the bone-blade straight to-

  I missed.

  Completely.

  My arm swung against empty air, barely even grazing the metal of its body.

  I paused, trying to figure out how I missed so badly, before it’s arm came swinging to retaliate.

  I yelped, skipping back a step to dodge before readying my arm again.

  Aim for the eye, I thought to myself. I jabbed forward again.

  Bullseye.

  The bone pierced right through the eye, the yellow light dying down as sparks flew from its now-empty socket. With a heavy thunk, it dropped to the floor.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Could’ve been worse. No nervous breakdowns yet.

  I looked ahead to see the other automatons charging towards us. Then I spun my head around to look at Leeroy.

  “You oka-?” I stopped as I looked at him, realising he was still standing in place, but was now scrunched up on himself, looking incredibly tense. Then the air around him fuzzing and waving like a mirage.

  There was a loud popping sound. Something shot out from Leeroy: a second Leeroy, completely identical to him except for the fact that he looked almost desaturated. The second Leeroy ran past me and into the crowd, heading for another automaton. Behind me, I could hear that popping sound again, and again, and again, as more and more clones of Leeroy shot out of him, bolting towards the group. Within about five seconds, twelve Leeroy clones had emerged and charged towards the Automatons like a mob.

  The first clone swung a fist at one of the automatons, his fist clanging against its metallic body; it didn’t seem to actually do anything. Then, three more Leeroy clones leapt to the first one’s side, one of them jumping at the automaton, both feet slamming into its chest in a perfect dropkick.

  The clones didn’t seem to be any stronger than Leeroy was, but the kick was enough to send the automaton toppling to the floor, giving two a chance to stomp its eye in, causing it to go limp.

  But as soon as it did, those four clones fuzzed before wafting away like smoke.

  The other automatons looked at us before immediately rushing away from us towards the building, much faster than before.

  “Shit!” I yelled, running after them.

  I quickly turned my head forward to see what Sweep and Spitter were doing. Sweep was floating about three or four stories up, that wind still visibly swirling around him, with a couple of people draped over his shoulder.

  As for Spitter, I could just barely see her perched in an opening on the building’s wall, next to a few survivors.

  She looked like she was about to vomit.

  She reared her head back, and I swear I saw her throat bloat up, almost like a frog, before she-

  A heavy metallic fist slammed into my ribs, knocking me to the ground in a tumble. I quickly pulled myself back up.

  My own fault. Should’ve stayed focused.

  I took a deep breath and span, facing the automaton.

  Stabbing it’s too precise. I thought. So lets’s try-

  I clenched my fist. The bone spike that had emerged before retracted back inside my arm, before my hand cracked. The fingers fused together into one lump of solid bone like a mace, shredding the skin of my hand.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  I swung, haymakering the automaton in the side. There was a loud clang as my fist made contact, causing it to stagger.

  I focused again, this time on my left hand; it morphed to match the right as I kept punching, keeping up the pressure. The hits weren’t elegant at all, but they were consistent.

  The robot raised a hand to swing again. I ducked to the side, before punching it right below the eye with an uppercut.

  That was enough, as it toppled to the ground in a heap.

  I quickly charged forward, past its dented body and towards the ones crowding around the building’s base.

  “L-Leeroy!” I shouted back, turning. He was still hunched over, trying to manifest more clones when he heard me, looking up.

  I pointed towards the crowd of automatons. He looked up and started running, that fuzzing air dissipating as he moved. I could see two of remaining clones from before in the middle of clotheslining one of the automatons closest to them before they puffed away.

  I looked up to Spitter again, looking like she’d been wiping her mouth. From where she was standing, there was a strange gelatinous string, almost like taffy, extending from where she was inside the building to the ground like a makeshift bridge.

  She was ushering the survivors in her section to it, as they bounced down the length of it.

  Meanwhile, Sweep had dropped the people he’d been holding to the ground before ascending back to the air again. Of all of us, he looked like he was the most in-control, he didn’t even look like he’d broken a sweat.

  I scanned the building quickly: six at the building’s base, three or four scaling the walls. Nine or ten total.

  As Leeroy jogged up next to me, I looked down at him. “How m-many can you make at once?”

  He looked at me, then looked up as if he was trying to do maths.

  “If I put my whole ass into it,” He said, “I can probably make a few dozen at once. They won’t last more than a few seconds though.”

  I nodded.

  “O-ok.” I said, tensing, feeling my power surge through my arms and legs. “Do as many as y-.”

  “You don’t gotta tell me what to do.” He said, cutting me off with a smirk.

  I felt myself clam up immediately, a small pit feeling like it was opening in my stomach. Leeroy didn’t seem to notice how that made me feel; why would he?

  He looked ahead, uncertain, before he braced himself. His entire body shimmered again like it was about to evaporate, before a chorus of popping noises - almost like someone cooking popcorn - erupted from his body.

  One by one, Leeroy clones erupted from him like a machine gun, all of them charging forward towards the automatons assembled at the bottom.

  I couldn’t have told you how many there were; I think I lost count after about twenty.

  It was chaos. The automatons looked genuinely surprised as they turned around to see this sea of Leeroys charging towards them like a tidal wave.

  The two crowds collided, slamming into each other. The noise was wild, the repeated sounds of bodies hitting metal, dull clangs sounding all over the place. Leeroys were punching, kicking, and scratching the automatons, performing everything from wrestling moves, to haymakers, even noogies.

  One Leeroy tried to kick an automaton in its non-existent balls. I’m fairly sure that clone broke his foot, because he screamed like he’d been shot before he puffed away into mist.

  I saw Spitter and Sweep both look down at the carnage.

  I just shrugged.

  The noise quickly subsided, with lots of the Leeroy clones fading away as quickly as they’d appeared. Within about twenty seconds from Leeroy first unleashing this tidal wave of himself, it had died down, leaving only a couple of battered automatons standing.

  Not wanting to waste the chance, I ran forward, arms stretched at my sides with my fingers parallel. I focused my power into my hands and fingers, forcing the bones to meld and stretch.

  With a wet tearing, I felt the fingers in both hands meld together; a long, wide, and razor-sharp white blade jutted from each of my wrists, just like I’d demonstrated to Crucible and Skate before.

  As I closed on the two automatons, I swung my right hand-blade at the one on the right, aiming for its torso.

  A clean hit, the blade slicing through; oil sprayed out of this thing’s body like blood, painting me in scattered dots of black.

  Then my arm stopped halfway through, hitting something internally with a thunk.

  I tried to move my right arm.

  It was stuck.

  I tried again.

  Still stuck.

  Shit, shit, SHIT!

  I was panicking, trying to wrench my arm free. Behind me I could hear the other automaton, its right arm starting to shift and change, plating and gears clicking into place until-

  CLANG!

  Something slammed into its head with a loud clanging thud, launching its head off of its shoulders as it collapsed in a heap. I looked down at what exactly had hit it.

  It was a lump of…dough? About the size of a basketball, which had hit this thing hard enough to blow its head off.

  I looked up before locking eyes with Spitter, who was giving me a cheeky thumbs up. I reciprocated, waving my free sword hand.

  Focusing, I took a deep breath before swinging at the automaton I was stuck inside with my free sword hand. This one cut through, meeting in the middle and neatly bisecting it.

  I pulled my arms away from its body, shaking my sword hands to get the oil it had spilt off of me. It wasn’t coming off.

  Great.

  I looked at Leeroy, who looked exhausted. He was sweating, red in the face, and wobbling slightly.

  Then, he looked at me. My hands were still shaped into those blades, bits of skin and muscle draped around the base of the blades like torn sleeves.

  I think this was too much for him, because he vomited, spilling his guts right between us.

  “S-sorry!” I apologised, reshaping my hand-blades back into actual hands. Well, the bones of hands; the skin and muscle would take a bit to come back. And they were still covered in oil.

  “It's ju-” He gagged, “Making that many clones takes a-” hurk. He waved a hand weakly. “Takes a lot out of me.”

  “O-ok, that’s s-somet-”

  “But also that’s really gross.” He said, more upright. I had to admit, that stung.

  “If you two are done down there,” we heard Sweep yell from above, carrying another person on his back, his voice carrying remarkably well given he was about five stories up at this point; must have been the wind. “We’ve still got people up here.”

  I looked up. In the mayhem of Leeroy’s clone army, I hadn’t even noticed that the automatons that had been scaling the building’s wall had been knocked down and collapsed to the ground in a heap; two with basketball-sized dents in their bodies, and two that looked like they’d broken from a fall.

  “S-sure! I’m c-coming up!” I yelled back.

  Question now was how.

  I looked at my hands; the flesh was regenerating pretty quickly, knitting itself back together around the bones.

  Unfortunately I was about to break it apart again, with something I’d only tested once.

  I focused, pooling my power into the bones of the palms of my hands, the “metacarpals”. This was more precise than I was used to. I felt the bones in my hands warp and reshape, hooked claws from my palms.

  Small hooks - like white climbing hooks or cat's claws - jutted from them. It’d have to do, and I had no idea if it would hold.

  I slammed the palm of my left hand into the side of the wall, the new spikes affixing to the glass.

  Then reached my right hand up, placing it further up. Both hands held. So far so good.

  I kept going, slowly climbing further and further. I wasn’t a practiced climber so this was slow going, but with time I got a couple of stories up.

  “H-how many left?” I shouted up.

  “Two more, one just above you! Think Sweep’s on his way to check his side.” Spitter shouted back. I turned back to her, she was just smiling at me from her perch where she’d made that strange taffy bridge.

  She reared back and spat out that edible taffy-stuff again, whipping her head to the side to make a kind of rope to reach the opening above me.

  “I’ll come give a hand!” She shouted as she jumped onto this makeshift taffy bridge, scampering up it like it was nothing.

  Then, a shout from above. I jerked my head up to see what it was; a man - one of the simulated survivors - had fallen from wherever he was above me. He was falling fast, in my direction but just barely out of reach.

  Spitter swore as he fell past her. I snapped my head around to look at her and Sweep. This guy was falling too fast, and I couldn’t see Sweep at all. They wouldn’t make it in time.

  I looked up at the falling man. I could catch him, if I was only a little bit closer.

  I looked behind me, then down. Best guess, twenty-foot drop, at least. Could I survive that?

  One way to find out.

  I launched myself away from the building, into the empty air, getting right under where the man would fall.

  Could I die in a simulation? I thought to myself as I looked up at the man falling towards me. Everything else is a simulation, but the gravity isn’t. The floor isn’t.

  I didn’t get a chance to ponder further as the falling man slammed into me, knocking the wind out of my lungs. My power surged on its own, like it was moving on instinct. The bones in my arm erupted from my skin, stretching around me, a cage, surrounding him like a skeletal harness.

  We tumbled through the air.

  For a simulation, he felt real too.

  I looked up at this makeshift bone cage I’d made.

  Have I ever made something like this before?

  I didn’t get a chance to ponder that any further, as we slammed into the ground.

  Everything hurt, down to my bones.

  Not surprising, given I’d just taken a fall that could kill most normal people.

  But the pain was the first sensation I became aware of. The second, was a voice.

  “Jesus what the hell is this kid made of?!” A voice growled.

  Then, the sound of cracking bone. Pain again; this time more intense. I shouted as my eyes opened.

  I wasn’t in the Action Room anymore. This felt different, sterile. It took a while for my eyes to focus on anything, but it looked like I was stuck in…a web? A cage?

  Then it all came back to me. The fall, my power shaping that net of bone from my arms. I could see cracks in it, like someone had tried to rip it apart

  Almost immediately as I realised that, my power tensed. The net of bone that had been my arms retracted, as I could feel my bones shape themselves back to normal slowly, the extra mass winding itself back into my body.

  “Well, you’re awake at least. Welcome back to the land of the living.” That voice growled again.

  I stared up at Mr. House. He looked intense, but also relieved.

  “H-how long was I out?” I asked, my voice quiet, strained.

  Mr. House looked at me and scoffed. “About twenty minutes. Impressive, honestly; I’ve seen shorter falls kill supers. So congrats on not dying, kid.”

  I shifted, and a dull pain throbbed through my body. Somehow, I instinctively knew that I’d broken quite a few bones.

  “So…d-did I do ok?” I asked, sheepish.

  Mr. House laughed again. “Well,” he said, pulling up a chair, “What you just did was one of the most reckless things I’ve ever seen in the years I’ve been involved in this process; to be blunt, you’re lucky to be alive.”

  I felt myself almost shrink.

  “But,” he continued, “You did what was asked. You and the rest of Team B collectively passed; how you’re rated individually, that’s for the panel to decide.”

  He slid over my backpack, placing it on a chair beside the bed I was sitting on.

  “All your stuff’s in there; when you’re feeling fit, get changed and hand your assessment uniform in at the desk. As far as the assessment goes, you’re done for the day, so once you’re changed you can go. You’ll receive a letter within the next couple of working days telling you what the next phase is.”

  I looked at him nodding; well, attempting to nod. My neck didn’t move so well.

  “What about…” I started, feeling tense, “What about the others?”

  “The simulation ended pretty much right after you hit the ground. They were debriefed and given the same line I just gave you. If its worth anything,” he said, smiling, “They were all worried. The other girl didn’t want to leave you like that.”

  My heart felt like it skipped, and I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.

  I don’t think Mr. House noticed, because he went to leave. But as he opened the door, he turned back to look at me.

  “For what it's worth, Skye,” he said, less gravelly than before. “You’ve got a lot of potential. No matter what happens, don’t let it go to waste.”

  I froze before I eventually nodded at him. “T-thank you, Mr. House, I…I won’t.”

  He nodded, leaving the room and closing it behind him.

  I took a moment, now that the room was silent. I didn’t move as I ran things through in my mind.

  By the sounds of it, I’d almost died. But, I was still alive; still here.

  But now, it was over. My assessment was done. The little team I’d briefly been a part of, separated.

  I had no idea if I’d ever see them again.

  I muttered to myself.

  “I wish I’d been able to say goodbye…”

  And then I noticed something. A little bit of paper stuck onto the side of my bag with what looked like a tiny bit of gum.

  I tilted my head quizzically, reaching down to peel it off. Turning it over, I could see there was something scrawled onto it, in pretty rough handwriting:

  “u seem cool - spitter”, with a phone number written below.

  I couldn’t tell you why, but reading that felt nice, warm.

  I pocketed the paper, smiling.

  Maybe I’d actually made a friend through all this.