The blue-lit corridor hummed quietly around him as he walked, arms folded behind his neck, moving at a pace that looked unhurried but wasn't. His mind was warm with the particular satisfaction of having
made one forward step, however small. The lights brightened gradually until a white blaze ahead told him he'd arrived.
He entered a curved room. The front wall was entirely transparent, with black iron bars welded into the clear material, the same alloy he'd seen throughout the base. White padded seats rose in tiered rows behind
the glass. Through it was a maintained clearing with grass and flowers in precise condition. And every tree in that clearing was black as charcoal, with its foliage dark purple.
A light touch on his shoulder.
Arte stood behind him, holding the combat uniform, matte black with white and purple linework that traced a rhombus around a stylized gothic N. Her expression had changed from the warm precision of earlier. She didn't try to hide it
"Mr. Klint. The challenge is about to begin."
He took the uniform and changed quickly, navigating between the tiered seats to the small, futuristic dressing room at the back. He glimpsed Monica through the glass, jaw set, thumbnail between her teeth, a faint line of blood already on her lip. He didn't try to break her out of it.
" Well, it's my fault after all ."
The suit was absurdly tight. It was also, he discovered as he moved around in it, completely inelastic in all the wrong ways and completely flexible in all the right ones. Second skin might be accurate. He stored his clothes, waited for the strange locker to fill itself, and turned. Jeanne was in the doorway.
He recognized her face before he'd consciously placed it: the fine cut of her eyes, the pale lips, the composed precision of her features despite whatever she was clearly feeling.
"Jeanne?" She nodded. Her hair moved.
"I'm—" She started. "I'm sorry. If I hadn't been...if I hadn't let him....none of this would have—" She couldn't finish it. She had tried several approaches to the sentence, and none of them were working. Lance noticed the bandage on her wrist.
" If she is a Meta, couldn't she heal herself? " A sense of contempt arose from within.
He took her by the shoulders and turned her gently to face him. Her eyes were full.
"You have nothing to apologize for." He said.
"What I did was impulsive and terrible, but I cannot stand watching someone get hurt for no reason. Especially someone who hasn't done anything wrong." He let go. "I'm the one who made this mess."
"Bad?" She managed, looking up at him.
"You're my squad partner, not that I know what it means, and you seem like a good person." He smiled and moved toward the door. "I'll manage to do something, I hope. If you want, we can talk after all the dust is settled." He paused in the doorway, hand on the frame, facing away from her.
"If you want..." He said again, quieter this time, clearly aware he'd said it twice.
Jeanne watched him leave. For a moment, she thought she saw something, a faint luminescence around his shoulders, there and gone.
" It reminds me of Mann. " She thought.
"Kindly step onto the platform, Mr. Klint." Arte was behind him, directing him to a marked section of the floor. Her tone was still sad, but professional.
"You know," she said, without looking at him, "giving up is a legitimate option. There's no shame in acknowledging the gap between where you are and where someone else is." Her voice was resigned rather than cruel.
"I appreciate your concern," Lance said, watching the elevator mechanism illuminate below his feet. "But I made a promise. And that matters more to me than someone like him does." The elevator descended.
Through the transparent wall of the mechanism shaft, he could see the center of the clearing and the figure already waiting there. The same black combat suit, fitted with a long cloak. A thick and ominous leather glove covering the right arm completely, running to the shoulder.
That was the overall presence of Maliard.
Lance stepped out of the elevator into the clearing. He walked toward the center with an empty expression and a measured pace.
" Same air as that mountain pass. " He thought. The same kind of thing is about to happen.
"Why does it always end like this?" Maliard looked at him, right into his burning eyes.
"You're in good physical condition," he said. "But that won't suffice." He tapped his gloved knuckle against his palm.
"IF YOU'D LIKE TO SKIP THIS AND SIMPLY APOLOGIZE, THAT OPTION IS STILL AVAILABLE." Lance cracked his neck and called across the distance between them. Maliard's expression went cold. He said nothing. He smiled slowly until a flare ignited above the clearing.
The ground beneath Lance tore apart. A series of sharp stone spikes erupted from the earth at high speed. He threw himself sideways, catching a shallow cut across one shoulder. He landed and rolled clean. A
thread of blood moved down the suit. It stopped almost immediately.
"You can do this?!"
"Good reflexes but not sufficient, as I said." Maliard's fingers snapped.
The cold thread crossed the back of Lance's neck. His body moved before his mind had finished deciding, throwing him clear of the rock blade that came from behind. The barrage continued. Spikes from multiple angles, forcing him back, never giving him a moment to plant.
" Can't match him at range. I need to get clear of his line of sight. Maybe the forest... " He focused, reaching for that current along his spine, and concentrated it in his legs.
" Do it," he told himself . "Now! "
He disappeared. Where he had been standing, the air moved. Maliard stopped. He turned slowly in place, scanning the clearing. Nothing but total silence.
Then, from somewhere beyond the tree line, the sound of rocks crushing against one another. The air got cut, pierced by that debris thrown from the shadows.
The impact landed between Maliard's shoulder and neck. Flesh gave way in a strip. Blood moved through the grass. Maliard pressed his hand to the wound. A white light covered him briefly, and it closed. He was breathing harder now.
A second projectile, from a different angle. He dodged, and the dart buried itself in a tree behind him, dropping it with a heavy impact.
"Lucky first throw. I know where you are now." He directed his gloved finger toward the origin and released. The forest sector dissolved in a synchronized eruption of stone and amalgamated wood, a wall of material driven upward and outward, tangling everything in its radius.
A branch snapped somewhere to the left. Maliard redirected instantly.
Lance broke from the trees at a flat run. In his hand, a stone the size of a fist. He planted, rotated, and threw.
" Frankly..Have I thought about what to do if I miss? "
Maliard erected a wall. The stone shattered it, and then Lance was past it. Behind him, a trail of numerous explosions from the mines set up under the dirt.
His fist connected with Maliard's abdomen with the accumulated force of the entire sprint. The impact translated through the suit. Maliard's body absorbed it as well as it could before it didn't, and he went airborne. He rolled twice across the grass and came to a stop.
Lace stood over the landing site, arm shaking, legs barely reporting.
"That worked..." He said, mostly to himself. A strange sensation circled inside his body, while his nape was cold and caressed by constant shivers.
" Was that man...Helping me "
" Farbern…. Hebt…" Maliard whispered, while a white light enveloped him entirely. He finally managed to get up. His nose had stopped bleeding.
"Yes, it indeed worked, to some extent at least." Maliard rose. The suit was open across the abdomen. The skin underneath was intact. He straightened his collar.
"You are remarkably well-adapted to the Frequency for someone with no training. I'd like to understand why." He began to remove the leather glove from his arm, slowly untying the ties that held it securely to the limb. The covering fell to the ground, revealing a dark black and red armor that completely covered his forearm and two fingers. The armguard's reflections of purple and red in the black iron knuckles made it shine in the sunlight, decorating the shadows.
He snapped his fingers again, and the applause reached the observation room loud and clear.
"Did you happen to expect a trap? Or was it just luck?" Maliard asked, severely pointing out Lance with his black arm. He rubbed the back of his neck, watching the craters behind.
"I thought that you could set up something like that. I do understand that your powers allow you to manipulate the terrain in some way." Lance frowned.
"It's common to make the mistake of thinking that you know an enemy's capabilities." Maliard's smile carried no warmth.
" Farbern ."
The cold thread came so fast, he barely caught it. He threw himself sideways but not quite far enough. The invisible cut opened his thigh, and blood ran freely. He kept moving. A second strike quartered the ground
to his left.
"The ability to create and alter the Frequency of any object or phenomenon, shaping it at will. Earth is one application, but not the only one." Maliard raised one finger, a pale pink light gathering at the tip. Lance felt something was wrong. He tried to jump, but the mud coiled at his feet, locking him in a coffin of dirt and grass.
"Schafft: Feurer."
A violent flash erupted from the nail. It struck the cage that had formed around Klint and took most of it with it—the force hurling rock fragments into the trees and against the observation window. Monica pressed her hands flat against the glass. Jeanne's hands covered her mouth.
"Farbern..." Lucas said from his seat, projecting a small hologram from the bronze ring on his finger. Data assembled in the air beside it.
Weight: 76 kg — Height: 182 cm — Demonstrated age: 20 — Chronological age: around 95 — Ability: Farbern, Hybrid-class Hel manipulation — Rank: Zwei.
"Even restrained by the artifact limiter," Monica said quietly, watching the flames catch in the purple leaves at the clearing's edge, "the offensive range and variability make it..."
"One of the worst possible skill sets to encounter in a fight." Lautre said from the seat beside her, raising a glass. Arte had refilled it at some point during the explosion.
"Assuming offensive potential, variability, and field self-sufficiency as primary metrics. Yes."
"Do you think Lance—"
"The fight isn't over." Lautre sipped the wine, otherwise known as his blood by now. "Have some faith in the recruit, would you?"
The smoke from the impact still hung at knee height across the clearing. Maliard walked through it, breathing with care; the explosive discharge had left the tip of his index finger with peeling, burned skin.
The Frequency overload was building. He'd been holding back, and he knew holding back was accelerating it.
" I knew that using this damm gauntlet without seriously going for the kill would turn detrimental... " He thought while regenerating his finger.
" I didn't aim for anything lethal. If he's Meta, he should have survived with significant injuries. If he's not..." He turned toward the elevator.
Then a sound registered that shouldn't have been there. Not in the clearing. Not at that distance.
Lance stood inches from him. Suit partially destroyed. Face covered in ash. Burns and cuts are visible through every gap in the material. His arm was drawn back like a compressed spring. His eyes filled to the brim with emotion, and one of them had acquired a golden tint.
Maliard's forearms came up by reflex. The bones fractured on contact. The force drove him clear off his feet. Lance caught his ankle before he touched the ground, swung him, and drove him into the scorched
earth with a sound that shook the clearing in a radius.
He tried to produce sound. The shock had removed the air from his lungs. He rose by instinct, blocked the next blow with his reconstructed forearms, and was thrown into a stone pillar anyway. Rock
and spine and suit material made their respective noises.
He found himself on the ground with both of them bleeding, and the clearing looking like an entirely different location than where the fight had started.
"You're more durable than I expected." He got up, slowly this time. He was out of breath, but still capable.
"Don't know how I am still here...Maybe I do really despise you." He washed off the saliva and ash from the edge of his lips
"You're talented, Mr. Amnesia." He pressed one palm toward Lance. An air bubble enclosed him, sealing. The pressure began to build.
Lance's lungs fought for anything. The walls pressed. His vision grayed at the edges. He pushed against the compression with both arms, bones registering under the force, sight losing specificity, consciousness
trying to slide somewhere easier.
" I am losing...Air... " Maliard, panting, began to compress something in his hands, the grain on his skin and the tremor of his flesh making the effort of the gesture shine through. Lance immediately felt the pressure around him, pressing on the walls of the bubble even more violently, trying not to get crushed.
" Use that ability, or you will lose. "
A voice in the dark, not quite his own. Familiar in the way that something familiar is before memory.
" Do you remember the name? "
Letters assembled in the space behind his eyes. He held them. He breathed against the pressure. He opened his mouth against the resistance.
" VERGEHEN !!!!"
The bubble detonated outward.
" Don't disappoint us. "
Maliard watched him emerge from the collapse of the sphere and land on a ridge of ash and grass—panting, one eye burning gold, the migraine detonating immediately behind it. His body was not ready for that volume of Frequency at once. He was trembling, trying to understand how he could even stand.
" Why is he so much like him? " Maliard thought, and the thought arrived with the weight of something he hadn't expected to feel today. The memory of his first defeat, decades ago, against a white-haired boy who had looked at him with the same eyes.
The dismay among the spectators was evident; what was supposed to be a one-way massacre had turned into a real conflict. Jeanne smiled as she saw Lance get up, but she couldn't hide her fear of that bright yellow eye. The same could be said for Monica, who smiled with happiness and dismay at the sight of the boy.
"I told you it wasn't finished yet, though it will be soon." Lautre said, placing the third glass of wine and holding a glass with a clear, but pungent-smelling liquid.
"Excuse me...Why?" Jeanne asked timidly, looking down.
"Both have reached their limit. The battle will be decided in this last attack." The instructor said solemnly, crossing his legs, eagerly awaiting the epilogue of the clash.
" Turner is holding back a lot; he could continue, but he doesn't go any further. Classic of that brat doing that. " He thought, swallowing the glass, observing the scars on Maliard's arm, far from appearing harmful.
The glove began to glow. Red and purple light swept across the clearing.
"You drove me to remove a limiter from the Relic." Maliard said as a thick blanket of black smoke rose from his extended arm. The mechanical tension inside it became audible.
"Feel whatever you want about that. You've earned a tiny bit of my respect."
"Honored," Lance said, cracking his knuckles. "But that still doesn't exempt you from the apology." He disappeared.
He approached, behind Maliard, blocked immediately by a wall of black iron blades emerging from nowhere. He disappeared again. Testing the geometry of the defense, looking for the gap that wasn't there. His tendons were reporting that the sudden stop-and-go was not something they had signed on for.
"There." Maliard drove a blade of molten metal through Lance's forearm. The sizzle of burning tissue and the smell of fat were specific and horrid sounds, but neither of them appeared to find this particularly notable.
As the first drop of burning metal slid from the blade, Lance lifted him. He rotated his full body through the movement and drove Maliard into the ground. The impact produced a crater. Rock fragments were scattered thirty meters in every direction.
A sharp pain registered in Lance's side: a stone spike had caught him through the suit, driven in several centimeters. He screamed, grabbed the weapon, and broke it.
Maliard sat up, spitting blood, and shook himself.
"With improved precision and speed, you can still match me directly." He almost sounded entertained.
"That's unusual. That's genuinely unusual."
"You weren't exaggerating your strength either..." Lance said, working the Frequency through his side, the body doing the work on its own, as it had been since the clearing. He just had to decide where to be next.
"And none of that is changing the apology situation."
"Let's end this." Maliard raised his arm. Pointed it. Held his hand in the shape of a firearm. Lance ran at him.
The ground erupted ahead of him with spikes, blades, multiplying, converging, the temperature rising as they began to liquify at their edges. Too late to process the geometry, too close to adjust the angle.
" Feurer!!! "
A column of fire rose directly in front of him and consumed the approach. The force of the eruption broke the nearest trees and drove them into the barrier. It punched a hole in the cloud layer above and swept the grey aside, leaving a burning gap in the artificial sky.
The observation window flexed. Jeanne went white. Monica was biting her thumb to the bone and no longer trying to stop herself.
"Now it's truly over..." Lautre said, setting down his glass.
"I guess he survived, but Lucas will need to do some extra work, sadly."
Something moved.
On the far edge of the cloud column, a silhouette. Maliard saw it. Snapped his fingers, iron blades slit the shape in half. Only shreds of a burned suit fell.
" A faint?! " The realization arrived slightly too late. Lance had never been above him. He had been running the entire time. The experience betrayed him, not allowing him to process the most stupid idea: a frontal assault.
He emerged from directly ahead, bare chest, ash and blood covering everything, suit entirely gone above the waist, and he threw himself forward with his full remaining velocity, hand closing around Maliard's
throat.
The first blow hit like a vehicle. The second was heavier. The third didn't slow down.
The final strike gathered everything: the Frequency, the exhaustion, the anger, the promise, all of it, and released it in a single white pulse that erased the red of the flames. Windows shattered. Spectators grabbed for their seats. Arte caught Lautre's arm to prevent him from going over. The grass rippled like water in every direction from the point of impact. Trees at the clearing's edge split and fell. A dome of displaced ash rolled outward and settled.
A superhuman sound came from somewhere in the center of the dome. Lance's arms hung at his sides, purple-patinated, blood-covered, trembling. He was upright. Maliard was not.
He lay at the bottom of the blast zone, barely breathing, the combat suit reduced to scraps across a torso covered in the specific and detailed record of the last several minutes. His ribcage was gone. His collarbone was gone. His forearms had mostly left as well.
"I guess I did hold back way too much... This was risky..." He looked at Lance. He was quiet for a moment.
"I don't like you...But you have talent." He coughed. Found the words. "Lance Klint. You're the winner." He closed his eyes.
The silence that followed had a different quality than the one at the start.
Lance's head was a weather event. The effort and the anger and the hunger and the exhaustion and the excitement had all found the same moment and become a single thing in it. His body folded, slowly, with
complete sincerity, toward the ash.
He heard a voice calling his name from somewhere across the clearing that felt much farther than it was. He turned his neck.
A figure in a blue cardigan was running across the grass with everything she had, arms open.
"LANCEEE!!!" Monica collided with him and held on with her entire body, shaking him, her face completely undone with relief and joy.
"HOW DID YOU DO IT?" She squeezed harder. Her tears were getting everywhere.
"Broken..." He whispered.
He went down. She went down with him and remained there for an extended period, face covered, turning red in escalating stages.
"Am I..." She pressed her hands to her face and spoke to no one. "Am I... heavy?"
He had already slipped into unconsciousness.
Lucas descended from the elevator and crossed the clearing, already calculating. "I'll prepare the medical room."
Edvard sat back in his seat beside a moderately intoxicated Lautre. Arte had produced ten glasses from somewhere and was counting.
"That boy," Edvard said. "Not bad at all, is he, Lautre?"
He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the ruined clearing. At the crater. Monica was still anchored to the unconscious boy in the ash.
"You're right." He didn't give the next thought any particular weight when he said it aloud. "Reminds me of August."
Ross's expression changed. He looked at him the way you look at someone who has just handed you something sharp without wrapping it.
"Don't say that name lightly, Lautre. To NOIR, it's a kind of sin." He helped him stand, with the patient assistance of someone long accustomed to this part of the evening. "Drink less."
"Yeah, like you don't know I can't get drunk." Lautre smiled, lowering the glass.
Although he thought, watching the boy being lifted carefully from the ground by two white-coated technicians, it was true.
" We haven't had a recruit this promising since August. Let's hope for everyone's sake that things go differently this time. "