Survivor's Gacha; Endless Improvisation

Training continued.

Near the gear tables, Travis ran triage on practice injuries, gold light guttering in his palms as a soldier hissed through his teeth.

"It's a sprain, not a death," he said. "Stop flirting with the apocalypse and drink the electrolytes".

While he worked, he soon noticed Ethan and flashed a lopsided grin. "You should sign my fan's ration cards".

"Have you heard? Surge Hands is taking autographs now."

Ethan rolled his eyes and refused to comment, taking a moment to catch his breath. He simply glared at him, a gesture which Travis laughed at.

On another side on a raised strip of cracked asphalt, the Mobility squad took their turn against a geometry of ice.

Selene, a Captain of the quarantine zone, compact and quiet, with her knives sheathed at her back stepped to the line.

As soon as she did, the Frost generators exhaled, painting the ground in a glass sheen. A tech lobbed steel marbles across her path as they bounced and settled, waiting to betray a footfall.

"Five meters, full blackout," the tech called.

The lamps blinked out, and Selene vanished.

Bzzz!

Her special ability was a unique one, but Ethan smiled at the sight of it because it reminded him of something that he also had.

One moment she was a breath beside him, and the next she's a smear of shadow three lengths away, then a hiss of fabric and she was perched on a collapsed barrier.

A second Mobility specialist, a lanky man in a patched coat, tried to imitate it and went down hard, causing the others to erupt into a fit of laughter.

Selene offered a hand without comment.

When he stood, she pointed at his hips, two fingers tapping a small rhythm. He adjusted his stance and nodded in gratitude.

During the next pass, he slid only once.

Jonas was not idle while the others worked. He worked the melee lane like a man trying to convince winter it had met spring.

He hit reinforced dummies until their torsos crumpled and set his jaw when frost built on his forearms.

"Again," he told the tech.

The tech specialist though frightened turned the dial anyway.

And as it all transpired in the training field, the Supreme Commandant watched from a balcony with two officers and a pair of Awakened. He spoke rarely, but when he did, squads changed what they were doing without argument.

"Rift-Frost Simulation Phase Two," the yard speakers soon announced. "Ambient drop, full wind".

"All lanes hold!"

In an instant, the world went colder as breath turned to knives.

The fine hairs inside Ethan's nose crisped.

Wind banged into them from the side, invisible palms shoving as frost filmed across metal frames and made seams glitter. Their fingers slowed, their joints stiffened, and shouts shortened to conserve heat.

"Hold the arc," Pyra hissed, her teeth chattering between words even as her flame guttered low, almost blue.

Kael's rig keened, but the coil net Ethan had deployed earlier still shimmered even as the cold punched through in pulses.

"Come on," Ethan whispered to the Wheel, willing for another improvisation, and it answered as soon as he dropped his palm.

DING!

~----~

[Improvised Gear: Thermal Pulse Band]

>A wrist wrap seeded with micro-sensitive fibers. On activation, sends wave pulses through bloodstream to raise core temperature and fight peripheral frostbite. Three charges.

~----~

Without hesitation, he slapped it on and thumbed the stud.

Immediately, warmth poured into him like a second breath. It was not exactly heat, rather it felt like the sensation of blood remembering how to move faster.

The pins and needles in his fingers retreated just enough to keep closure on Pyra's left seam when she faltered.

"How are you still steady?" She rasped, astonished.

"Cheating," Ethan replied with a mischievous grin on his face.

Pyra shivered.

Across the yard, Holt's trackers moved with a different kind of speed, mapping where frost wanted to linger.

Dane and the demo crew set a line, then another, then a third, and more until the ground between them looked like a spider had been angry.

The wind ramped and the fog closed.

But then, a trainee slipped, his head clipping the edge of a barrier with a sound like ice cracking.

"Medic!" Holt called, but Travis was faster as he slid on his knees, palms flaring bright as he cupped the man's skull.

"Stay with me man," Travis said, his voice low and tender. "You do not get to die in rehearsal, that's pathetic".

"…" The others speechlessly stared at him.

The training didn't stop due to that interruption though.

Soon, the wind in the yard shifted its tone from cold to colder. The Commandant lifted one finger, and the simulators hiccuped before backing off.

Finally, heat returned to their bodies.

The injured trainee blinked. Beside him, Travis sagged and flashed a crooked grin. "See? Soup's back on the menu."

A few laughed, but then they started again… non-stop training.

…

By afternoon, synergy began to form among the taskforce.

Ethan's lane now moved in something like rhythm. The coil net had to be replaced twice, while Kael ranted about filament fatigue and then replaced them with a muttered apology to the laws of thermodynamics.

Pyra learned to feather her flame rather than blast. They found that if Ethan placed the net slightly forward of her arc, it scrubbed frost before it reached the fire, increasing fuel efficiency and letting Kael's rig breathe.

"Well, forgive me for not seeing on time, you're not useless," Pyra said with a smile at the end of another drill session.

Ethan grinned in her direction. "It's nothing, just parlor tricks".

Pyra rolled her eyes. "As if".

Dane who was nearby chuckled at that. "Your ability is really weird. I like my solutions simple… pull pin, make a hole, no asking."

He sarcastically mimed Ethan's palm drop. "What happens when your carnival wheel gives you a balloon animal while the Frost Wolf eats Kael?"

Jonas' shadow arrived before Ethan could say a word. "It'll give him a knife, and I'll give you a reason to pick your teeth up off the yard."

His voice had a threatening edge to it.

Dane's smile didn't fade, but he lifted his hands. "Captain," he said easily. "Just stress-testing the faith."

Ethan put a hand on Jonas' wrist. "It's fine," he said.

He turned to Dane. "You blow holes, I make places to put them. Neither works without the other, you have to understand that".

Dane waved his hand dismissively before leaving. Watching him leave, Jonas snorted. "Guy wants the world to be gunpowder," he said. "He thinks violence makes the world feel simple".

"Maybe it is for him," Ethan said while smiling.

Jonas shrugged.

A few minutes later, they went back to work.

…

As dusk slid over the yard, squads drifted into tired clusters, and Engineers coiled cables with the affection of sailors.

Trackers compared notes in murmurs and gestures like they were building a map out of hands. As for Selene, she sat on the barrier's edge, polishing a knife with a strip of cloth, her posture at rest the way a cat is at rest, though still a coil.

Pyra warmed her fingers over a camp heater and looked like a woman remembering beaches that never existed.

Kael took apart his rig and made two neat piles, creating things that worked and things he would make work by morning.

Ethan eased himself onto a crate and watched the yard breathe.

He could feel it now, the emergent rhythm Holt was trying to conjure. These were not twenty edges, they were the outline of a single blade… a team.

The Supreme Commandant stepped to the balcony rail above them and let the quiet find him. He didn't lift his voice; he didn't need to.

"What you faced today," he said, "was frost on a leash."

He gestured at the generators, the rigs, and then the tidy lines of charge tape. "In a few days it will not be a machine, it will be a monster".

"It will not pulse on a schedule. It will not freeze where you expect it to, and it will not be content to be simulated. It will be the real thing".

"You will tire and it will not".

"You will slip and it will not."

He paused and let the yard listen, then he continued. "If you break in front of it, you don't just die, you break Fort Aegis with you".

"Don't break".

He left them to the weight of that and disappeared back into the fortress.

As he left, wind crawled across the yard, stealing heat from sweat. Travis soon wandered through yard and dropped packets of salt and something almost like tea into hands that shook with exhaustion.

Selene flicked her knife once, twice, then smiled at nothing.

As he ate, Ethan felt the Wheel spin faintly behind his eyes, like a coin that never quite settled on a face. He lifted his hand and didn't drop it; he just held it there, feeling the possibility hum through tendon and bone.

'Adapt or die', he thought.

The coin spun, the yard breathed.

And then, night came in like another kind of training.