Summus Proelium

Fuck, fuck, fuck, why was I out on the field now? Why the hell did this match have to be happening right this very moment? I knew what I needed to be doing, or at least who I had to start looking into. I had something, I finally fucking had something, and I really needed to focus on that. But instead, I was out here walking with a few other Touched across the field as the crowd in those nearby stands roared and waved. Their cheers were deafening, but I didn't really hear them at all. It was all just muted background noise while that full realization swept over me.

Honestly, in that moment I was severely tempted to just turn around and run right back out of the arena. And how would that look? Maybe everyone would think I was just freaking out about the regular stress of the tournament. Maybe they'd think I was a coward and a loser. But did I really care if they thought that, especially when put against the actual stakes of this whole situation? No, of course not. They could think anything they wanted about me, it didn't actually matter. I'd get over a little loss of reputation. I would not get over losing Paige, let alone Sierra, Irelyn, and even Echo as well. I would not get over being the cause of anything happening to those four.

That was also what actually stopped me from running out of there right then. Because it might not have mattered what the rest of the crowd, my fellow competitors, even the entire audience watching over the internet or on TV thought about me abandoning the match. Millions of people could think I was a complete coward who choked on live television, and it really wouldn't have bothered me at all when compared to the chance to save the others. Casura, however, was a very different story, and she was also going to be watching this. If she saw me run out, she'd know that I had figured something out. And on top of that, she'd know that I was putting things at risk by not playing along with the games. Someone might check on me, investigate why I had run off like that. All of which might be enough for her to do something drastic, something horrific.

I couldn't take that risk. No matter how anxious I felt, no matter how much the thought of staying out here for however long this match took while I finally had some actual idea of what was going on made my stomach twist itself in knots, I couldn't risk setting Casura off. I had to let her keep thinking I had no idea what she was after, that I was still running around in circles. Which, to be honest, I hadn't exactly escaped that round track just yet. But maybe I was running a little higher so I could see over the fence. Or something, the metaphor was starting to get away from me.

So no, I couldn't go out there just yet. But even as we took our places at our starting lines, with Nqobile playing up for the crowd to make them even more excited (including what was frankly a bit more focus on me than I really needed right then), I kept going over my realization, thinking it through a bit more to make sure I couldn't immediately dismiss the idea on further consideration.

It was really about what Pascenic had said, back in the ready room just before we'd all started to head out here. They'd said they had promised their team they would win, and that you never want to let down your team. You never want to let down your team. That was what flipped on the lightbulb over my head, what I had been thinking about (okay, obsessing over) this whole time.

The other three were calling out good-natured taunts to one another as we took our places and went down into the ready position. But my mind was a million miles away. Or rather, a few hundred feet, as far as my backpack where that stack of papers was. The papers with all those names that I had gone over until my eyes were practically bleeding. I'd read them so much I could picture the exact part in question as plainly as if I was actually holding the paper right then. A single name, toward the bottom of the tenth page: Safeguard - New York Conservators.

Safeguard, that was his name. The guy's powers made him invulnerable. But not just in a usual flying brick sort of way. He was really invulnerable to everything. That was his whole schtick. Nothing could damage him, no other powers would work on him if he didn't want them to, no matter what they were. He couldn't be teleported if he chose not to be, burned, frozen, electrocuted, mental powers didn't work, drugs didn't work, nothing. He was just immune to everything, period. And even more impressively, he was capable of temporarily extending that protection to anyone he could touch. If he managed to get his hands on someone (or vice versa if he was willing), an entire mountain could collapse on top of them and they'd walk away without a single scratch.

That by itself explained why Casura couldn't go after him directly if she wanted to hurt the guy. Especially if she wanted to take that power for herself or something. He was immune to anything she could throw at him. So she couldn't take his blood. It didn't, however, explain why he would be a target. That bit came after the name, that second part. New York Conservators. New York. That was where Mingle had come from originally. Mingle, one half of what had become Casura.

I didn't know the full story there, just what basically everyone knew. Mingle had the power to possess people and make them stronger while taking control of them. She'd tried to do that with a Fell-Touched known as Bloodfall, whose power was… well, control over blood. But the Fell had reacted badly, trying to kill herself by halting the bloodflow to her brain rather than allow herself to be possessed and controlled. Something had gone wrong with all of that, making both Mingle and Bloodfall merge fully into a single being: Casura. With their combined powers, she was able to take blood from other Touched, absorb it into herself, and manifest versions of their powers permanently. That was why she was such a big threat, because the more blood she took from other Touched, the more powers she could stack.

The point being, Casura had once been two separate people, one of whom was Mingle. And she had been part of the Conservators. Specifically, the New York Conservators, the same team this Safeguard guy was from. In fact, they had both been on the team together. I knew that for a fact because he had repeatedly said he was going to find a way to separate them to get his friend back, his teammate. It was just like Pascenic had said, you never want to let down your team. Mingle was his teammate, his friend, and he had been trying to find a way to bring her back ever since Casura was created. In any other situation, that would've made him an immediate target. But his power made that a lot more difficult. She couldn't just attack the guy like she would most people who pissed her off.

But what if Casura had a way of completely bypassing the shield that protected him? More to the point, what if she had a way of getting him to bypass it for her? The ring. If he put that on his finger, it would connect straight into his body for that genetic test. That was how the rings were able to be locked to one person's DNA, and how Pittman's Biolem programming stuff was meant to be injected. If Safeguard put that ring on and allowed it to bypass his protection, it would allow Casura to take control of him. She'd be able to force him to let down his shield so she could take his blood or… or do anything to him. She'd be able to make a big public example out of him for daring to talk about bringing Mingle back. I knew it had to piss her off. She wanted to end him.

That was what had been bugging me whenever I scanned through the list of competitors, the name that had been itching my brain that whole time. Safeguard, Mingle's old teammates who wanted to save her, who talked a lot about saving her. From the moment I saw his name there, a voice in the back of my head had been screaming for me to pay attention to it, to remember who the guy was. But it didn't actually click until that bit from Pascenic. Then the light came on and I knew. I just knew that this was what Casura was really doing. This was why she had to keep the fact that she was around so secret, when she would normally be making herself the center of attention. That by itself had been a red flag. Casura fucking loved attention. The fact that she wanted her presence to be secret had to have meant something big. And this was why. She couldn't let Safeguard know she was here or planning anything, or he'd never let his guard down. Hell, if he knew she was nearby, he'd probably stop competing entirely just to focus on trying to save Mingle somehow. Casura couldn't have that. She needed him to win one of the rings, which meant keeping a very low profile. Including making sure I kept quiet about it.

All of that flashed through my mind as I took my ready position. And boy was that term a lie. I wasn't ready for this at all. I didn't even want to be here right now. Safeguard was out there, maybe elsewhere in the arena, maybe in the city beyond. Wherever he was, it wasn't this field. I wanted to warn him, tell him what was going on. But, of course, I couldn't. Even if I hadn't been stuck playing out this match, I was pretty sure telling the guy Casura was specifically targeting might just trip her warning alarm thing she had pointed at me. If I said a single word to him about this whole situation, she'd kill Paige and the others before I could even finish convincing the guy I wasn't lying. Hell, she'd probably kill all of them before I could even finish a single sentence.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

So, ready or not, I had to stay here and keep participating. There was nothing I could do about it until after the match. And even then I was going to have to be very careful about what I did, to avoid tripping Casura's little alert thing. At least I could be pretty sure nothing would happen in the meantime. The ceremony wasn't going to happen until Saturday, so as long as I didn't do anything to make Casura think she had to take drastic measures, nothing would change while the match was going on. Hard as it was, I took a deep breath and shoved all those thoughts out of my head for now. I set aside my anxiety, my fear, my anger and helplessness. I put it all away.

It was pretty good timing on my part, since the second I gave myself that little mental shake and fully focused on what was going on came just before Nqobile (and the rest of the crowd who were helping) finished counting down. The word 'go' echoed across the field, bellowed out by damn near every single person in the stadium as the voices completely drowned out the chime sound that was supposed to start the match. A chime that was phenomenally redundant by that point.

The five of us had each started out on top of our own little platform things, the ones we were supposed to be trying to get our opponents' balls onto. Toward the very end of that countdown, each of those balls came flying down out of the air. It was timed perfectly so that the instant the word 'go' was being shouted, the balls hit the ground and started bouncing right back up again. That was the only time the balls would bounce like that, apparently. The point was for them to come in at an angle and fly back up in the air so they would scatter and land on some of the ramps and obstacles spread through the arena. That, the moment the balls were rebounding off the grass and being sent in every direction, was when we all launched ourselves off the platforms, while the roar from the crowd became almost deafening cheers of encouragement.

In addition to having our names and pictures on them, the balls were color coded so we wouldn't accidentally go after our own. Pascenic's was black, Wrecker's was bright yellow, Turbow's blue, and Frey's purple. Nothing that would blend into the green grass, or the red obstacles. As for mine? My ball was practically a rainbow, covered in dozens of color splotches. It was basically the tie-dye ball. And whoever had made that particular decision was probably still giggling about it.

But my own ball didn't matter right now. I couldn't get any points from it. Instead, I focused on the yellow one, which went higher than all the others and curved around to land on top of this narrow, curved ramp thing that started just a few feet off the ground before winding up in a wide, gradually rising half-circle that carried it around half the arena. The opposite end was about forty feet in the air. Wrecker's ball had landed about three-quarters of the way up and was already starting to roll back down. Not that it would get very far, considering Frey had already used those bionic legs to take a running jump over twenty feet up there to land just a bit below the ball so she could reach out to give it a push off the ramp and toward her own platform. It was a smart play. The balls wouldn't bounce anymore, couldn't even come up off the ground once they were down now that the Touched-Tech had kicked in. But this was the highest ball, so knocking it off the ramp toward your own platform could be a pretty good advantage for the first few seconds. From that high up, it had further to fall, so if it came off at an angle, it would land closer to where Frey wanted it. Sure, it wasn't exactly a huge difference, but every little bit helped in something like this.

Or it would have, except just as the woman reached out for the ball to give it a shove that way, I appeared on the opposite side after sending a shot of my rainbow paint so I could teleport there. Even as I appeared, one hand was already touching the ball so I could give it a shove the other way, sending the thing falling off that side of the ramp. My other hand was raised to point at Frey, making the woman reflexively twist her head slightly to the side. It was only a very slight flinch, but it was a flinch, and that was all I needed. The woman literally took her eyes off the ball for an instant.

By the time she looked back, I was already throwing myself sidelong off the ramp to go after the ball. But she didn't follow. Probably because she was busy with the ball she had just been trying to grab. Or rather, what she thought was the ball. In the moment that I had put my hand on the thing to make it move, I also covered the entire thing in yellow paint. The same color the ball itself was. I completely coated the thing with that paint. As Frey was reflexively flinching away from the paint she assumed was about to come from my other hand, I pushed the actual ball off the ramp while simultaneously using the yellow I'd put over it to create a paint-construct.

The first time I'd done something like this was basically an accident, back when I Touched for the second time. I'd managed to make a paint-construct copy of that concrete-manipulator's flying cement fist after he sent it flying through my liquid form. Now I'd done the same thing just by painting the ball, then willing the paint to stay behind as I pushed the actual ball away from it.

And just like that, as I threw myself sideways off the ramp, there was what looked like the actual ball still sitting right there in front of Frey. I wasn't sure if she thought I'd messed up and missed or what, but either way the ball seemed to still be there. And it would feel like the ball too, at least at first. My paint constructs took on the basic physical properties of the thing they were copying. It couldn't replicate the way the Touched-Tech would keep the ball from bouncing or flying anywhere. Which I could've made up for by focusing on the ball to force it not to move, but I didn't want to waste that sort of effort. The whole point was just to distract her for a few seconds, and it did that well enough without any extra help. She gave the thing a shove off the opposite side and jumped after it.

I could've left it like that, sure. I could've just let the paint-construct bounce to let her know it was fake, or dissolve it without any fanfare. Instead, I went one step further. As the ball hit the ground, it splattered. But rather than simply becoming a random splotch of yellow, I made the thing spray out in a specific pattern. Three letters, or two depending on how you counted. LOL. Yeah, Frey was dropping through the air after the ball when it completely inexplicably splattered like a water balloon on impact with the grass and spelled out LOL right in front of her. Maybe I had just a little bit of stress I needed to work out.

By that point, I was on the ground after going over the opposite side of that ramp. I'd landed right by the ball, which hit the grass and stayed right there without any bounce at all. One hand was already against the thing, pushing hard while I pointed down with my other hand, leaving a stream of red and blue paint behind and around me. As soon as I saw anyone crossing that space to try to stop me from reaching my platform with the ball, that combination would yank them straight down and hold them for a few seconds.

This was just the start of the match, but it was already utter pandemonium. I could hear the others going at it full tilt. Turbow appeared out of the corner of my eye, raising his energy bow just long enough to send an arrow off toward the far side of the stands. As it went flying, his speed was suddenly boosted, turning his next motions into a blur as he quickly sent three more arrows flying in the span of a second.

Two of the arrows were sent as far as possible, off toward the opposite side of the stadium, obviously just meant to keep his speed up. The third one hit the ground in front of the ball Wrecker was pushing. Which actually looked a little funny, to be honest. The guy was eight and a half feet tall, practically as wide around, and covered in green and gold metal armor. And there he was, leaning over a bit to very carefully push the ball a bit at a time with a couple fingers. It didn't matter how strong he was, the ball would only move at its own pace as long as he was touching it.

Or it was moving, until Turbow's arrow hit the ground in front of it. The instant it did, the kid was there. He teleported straight to where his arrow landed, directly in the ball's path. Which seemed like a dangerous place to be, considering one of Wrecker's powers made him all-but impossible to stop once he started moving.

But, as it turned out, the kid didn't need to stop Wrecker. He only needed to prevent him from getting the ball where he wanted it to go. Which he did by using that speed of his to vault over the ball, slapping a hand against it in the process. With that touch, he made the ball go to the left, out from in front of the big guy. That wouldn't have been a problem at all for Wrecker, except Turbow's next move was to slap his other hand against the guy's side while diving past him.

Yeah, he instilled all that speed into the giant man just as the ball was pushed away from him. Wrecker was intent on moving forward, and was already pretty quick on his own. The second he was put into fast forward by Turbow's boost, he was halfway across the field before realizing he'd completely lost the ball. Which was around the time those arrows hit the far side of the arena and he was back to normal speed again.

Yeesh, the kid was good. He clearly had plenty of experience, and the others were right there with him. If I wanted to get more LEAT points for one of those rings so I could be out on the field on Saturday, I had to step it up.

And when I was done playing this sports field game, maybe I could see about figuring out a way to talk to Safeguard without getting Paige, Sierra, Irelyn, Echo, and… maybe every other person in this tournament killed.