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  He had to ‘run’ five laps through the park to complete the challenge, tagging pedestals at either end without getting shot…and staying on the open paths was a quick way to make that happen, but then again pushing through the undergrowth was slow work, and the longer he stayed ‘live’ on the course the better the chance that they’d catch up to him, given that more rovers were added to the hunt on a random basis as the clock ticked off more minutes.

  Paul had to be quick but not careless, which was the point of the challenge. It was one of many new adept-level challenges that they’d been designing themselves. This one was two months old and looked to be one that they would keep, while some others hadn’t lasted more than a couple days before being junked. The adepts were experimenting with many aspects of their training, and the things they didn’t like they quickly got rid of.

  Paul stopped short of a large cluster of boulders blocking this end of the ravine, then set himself before leaping up to one on the right and bounce-jumping off its angled side up to the top one. He grabbed onto it with the traction pads on his gloves, elbows, and knees and crawled over, swinging his legs around and dropping to a lower rock on the other side where he bounced off and returned to his run as the nearby humming sound increased in intensity, meaning more of the devices were closing in on him.

  The hover-rovers had been a new addition by the trainers, suspended mid air by means of four fan blade engines keeping them well out of reach of the adepts, taking away their ability to disable them with their bare hands. They had no target spheres, nor did Paul have a weapon in this challenge, so there wasn’t much he could do about them aside from run and run fast.

  He was tempted to chuck a rock at them, but he knew more would come to replace any he downed so he had little choice but to keep moving. He was on his third lap in the outward leg, meaning when he got to the next pedestal he would be halfway, but it was a good quarter mile ahead with an open, dry creek bed in between which Paul knew he had to avoid, so his route would have to be an even longer circuitous one.

  In the past this running drill would have taken him more than an hour to complete, if he could have completed it at all with the swarm of rovers hunting him, but his speed and reflexes had advanced so much in the past year and a half that it wasn’t much of a problem so long as he could keep them out of sight. His armor would even diminish the stingers’ bite a bit, allowing him to take one or two extra before going down, but more often than not Paul was able to evade the incoming rounds when he knew they were coming, even with the armor slowing his reaction speed.

  It was when he didn’t see them coming that was the problem, and with multiple hunters he couldn’t rely on sight alone. This challenge was as much about speed as it was situational awareness…something that the adepts had been focusing on heavily the past year.

  None of them had opted to take any of the augmentation drugs that the Black Knight had, but with Wilson’s help they’d begun troubleshooting ways of creating the same upgrades through training, including the sensory enhancement package that Vermaire got. It would take much longer, they knew, even if it was possible, but that wasn’t going to stop them from trying, feeling that doing it through training would be more reliable and beneficial in the long run, so they’d begun experimenting with a myriad of sensory enhancement drills.

  They had a rough go of it at first, as they did with all the other upgrades they were attempting to create. After a few months of basic fitness training they’d begun experimenting in small groups with different ideas then sharing data afterwards as they began to develop their own training regimen, both for themselves and the incoming second class that was scheduled to graduate in about a year’s time if they were able to get through the Final Challenge. He certainly hoped they were up to it, but he definitely didn’t trust them to be able to improvise the way they did, so it was essential that they get the basic training program established before the newbs came to join them.

  It was frustrating at first, but after they got their feet wet small epiphanies began to take place…things that the trainers had never anticipated, nor had they seen with Vermaire. Sudden spikes in ability or random insights started to pop up amongst the adepts, often after dry spells that saw little or no improvement. They’d literally walk into their training area, ready to do the same workout they’d been doing for weeks and suddenly have a different body…like all the training they’d been doing had been backlogged and finally caught up in a massive surge of improvement.

  The prompting for the sensory enhancement drills had occurred in a similar manner. After working for months on active marksmanship drills, Taryn woke up one morning to find that her eyesight had improved. At first she thought it was a fluke…sometimes eyesight would waver with varying levels of fatigue, but after three days of the markedly improved vision she and the others began discussing the possible source of the improvement and how to replicate it with targeted training.

  After that any training epiphanies, no matter how small, were immediately shared and analyzed, offering the adepts a glimpse at new training possibilities, which to them was like finding Easter eggs. With them already having finished and surpassed the best training the planet had to offer they were truly trailblazing at this point, and any new insight excited them to no end.

  With the early frustration gone and a pattern of discovery established, the adepts were literally tearing their way into the future, spending hour after painstaking hour training, testing, and vetting new training methods in addition to progressing through the new challenges they’d created that would eventually lead to a second graduation to superhuman status…though that was in the distant future, so much so that they hadn’t even chose a name for the third rank. What training challenges and drills they’d created provided the footwork for the adept training program, with the bulk of the content still to be created/discovered.

  In retrospect, Paul couldn’t believe how far he’d advanced since he began taking the ambrosia. His abilities now made his trainee self seem pathetically out of shape…much like he’d viewed his prior Star Force self when going through his initial training. The main difference now, however, was that he didn’t feel like he was on top of the world, but rather at the very bottom with virtually limitless potential as he looked into the future. How much stronger would he be in another year? In another decade? Or even, if he truly lived that long, another century?

  The potential was mindboggling, and the more he and the others learned and fine-tuned their training the more they began to glimpse on the horizon, like they’d been climbing up to the top of one of the Egyptian pyramids, sensing the peak coming with no more room to climb…only to get there and discover that the apex wasn’t the end, but the chokepoint of an hourglass. After the narrow portion was reached the walls would begin to expand again, opening up into more and more possibilities, leaving the future wide open to almost anything.

  Davis had said that ignorance was the downfall of civilization, and Paul now realized that his passing through that chokepoint hadn’t been a matter of workouts, but a matter of understanding how his body worked. His eyes had been opened, thanks to the massive amount of training that the ambrosia enabled him to endure and learn from. With what he knew now, he figured he could have reached the point of self-sufficiency without the ambrosia, as Wilson had done/attempting to do…the jury was still out on that one.

  The ‘pyramid’ that he had been climbing was nothing but an illusion, for the potential had always been there…now he simply had the eyes to see it.

  Knowledge was power, and that lesson had never been more clear than it was continuously becoming for Paul and the others. He often wondered what else he didn’t know…which made him even more excited about pressing forward into the future.

  When Paul eventually got to the end of the jungle park he had to sprint across a tiny clearing and tag the button atop the pedestal, dodging stingers for two seconds as he crossed from left to right so he didn’t have to stop momentarily to reverse
course and give the rovers a better target. He slapped down the button on the run then ducked back into the foliage and disappeared from view as a few paint splatters speckled the armor covering his shins as the tiny stingers broke apart on the ground beneath his feet.

  He felt just a hint of numbness but it wasn’t enough to slow him down. Paul cut right and up a small dirt-covered ridgeline, then chanced a quick run down an open path before cutting back into cover…more to test how close the rovers were than to cover ground. When he didn’t receive an immediate response he figured he had a few steps on them and pushed his pace, taking a more direct route through the underbrush than normal as he headed back to the start point to finish his third lap.

  Up above, in a wall nook that he couldn’t see, a pair of rovers powered up and took flight, adding yet two more hunters that would push Paul’s speed, agility, and situational awareness even further, making him move constantly to stay alive…or in this case conscious. Repetition, they knew, was the key to adaptation, so they had to keep the pressure on constantly during the challenge, and then repeat the challenge day in and day out.

  This was Paul’s morning run, which followed his typical 10k on the track, making his legs a bit fatigued in addition to the drag of the armor. After 30-40 minutes of this jungle challenge he’d head over to the sparring area and get in more sword work before taking a quick break for lunch. His second 10k of the day had been scrapped months ago in favor of a stretching/gymnastics package that some of the specialists in that area had developed and they’d agreed to make part of their standard adept training.

  In addition to his previous backbend, Paul now could do a back flip and forward flip on the run, as well as several intricate yoga-like twists and bends that continually and aggressively pressed his flexibility to new levels, thanks to the ambrosia’s ability to sustain and refurbish his muscles, joints, tendons, and other tissues…otherwise he was sure he would have broken or strained something by now.

  Thankfully the training regimen had been experimented with and vetted by those with gymnastic/flexibility skills exceeding his own, so his progression in that area was smooth and consistent, without him having to worry about what he was doing, only about finishing the drills that were assigned and trusting that his fellow adepts knew what they were doing…which they did.

  The remainder of the day was split between standard training and experimental, with Paul’s experimental focused on running and swords, the first of which he finished up last in the form of a 2nd 10k, bracketing his day with continually faster and faster running, which he’d gotten down to 5:40 pace, thanks in part to scrapping one of the original 10ks, but also to him holding to the pace marker lap after lap, day after day and never slowing down, always keeping it the same or a tiny bit faster.

  He held that ‘line in the sand’ no matter how good or bad he felt, and gradually worked his way up to faster speeds while the other runners each experimented in their own ways. Some had hard/easy workout schedules, others kept to Paul’s medium-every-day approach while varying distances and number of workouts. Some were even doing their runs in armor as if it were Piccolo’s weighted training clothing from DBZ.

  Altogether they were making progress individually while amassing a tremendous amount of collective experience that was slowly creating a monster of a training regimen…one that, with adequate ambrosia levels, was going to turn them and the subsequent classes into literal superhumans.

  The only questions at this point were how long they could they keep this level of training up and how far could they push their abilities…though in the back of their minds there was always another lingering question, one that they tried not to dwell on.

  How far would they need to go to match the centuries, if not millennia old V’kit’no’sat Human slaves...and how many years would it take them to pull even?

  2

  After finishing his daily workouts Paul came back to the adept ‘block’ and immediately went to the snack room to grab three ambrosia wafers, already feeling a bit drained from the day. He scarfed them down along with a bottle of water before heading over to the cafeteria for supper, after which all 100 of the adepts gathered in the lounge for a ‘team’ meeting at Greg’s request.

  Normally their downtime was spent either working on designing the training programs, equipment, and other facets of their soon to be military, or simply spent relaxing as they had as trainees…rarely were any official meetings called, so Paul and the others were more than interested in what Greg had to tell them as they stuffed themselves into the couches and chairs with a few stragglers left standing in back leaning on the walls.

  Greg took no chair, instead preferring to stand in the center of their informal semicircle just in front of the wall screen amidst the various gaming devices and controllers lined up neatly on racks. He was the most muscular of them all, having focused his elective training on hand to hand combat, but like the others he was still rail thin and light weight, a good 20 lbs lighter than he had been in the NFL, now with training-focused musculature rather than the crude bulk created in a weight room.

  “I’ll keep this brief, and I apologize for taking you away from your activities, but there’s something we need to discuss before we proceed any further,” he began, starting to gently pace back and forth, looking more at the ground and walls than any one person in particular.

  “We’ve all been working our asses off since the day we got here, even more so since we graduated and started taking the ambrosia. The results speak for themselves, but more and more I hear you talking about what you’d like to do next, how to take your training to the next level, what new skills you can develop, etc. I feel the same way, and encourage you to pursue those aspirations. Very few people can keep at it like we can. Some can handle the intensity, others can handle the duration, but rare are the ones that can juggle both…and with the ambrosia added it takes us into a whole new ballpark.”

  “Because we can train for long hours we do…but for how long? Some of our trainers suggested that we’d burn out, ambrosia or not. That hasn’t happened. We’ve been smart about our training, and where we’ve failed we’ve learned and adapted. I’d speculate we know more than the trainers do by now, and I don’t see us hitting a wall as far as ability or drive is concerned, but I do think we have a greater problem on the horizon…time.”

  “We need to be training for at least 6 hours a day everyday to cover the basics, else we risk a backslide. We cannot afford to take time off. That little stint Sam, Rex, Kent, and I took up to the gravity training station was a mistake. The travel time inactivity was bad enough, but once we got there we didn’t have the necessary facilities to keep up with our normal training, so we had to cut part of it out for a month. Big mistake.”

  “It took me a good two weeks before I caught back up to where I left off on the drills that the station didn’t have equipment for, which meant I basically lost 6 weeks worth of workouts in exchange for the zero, low, and high gravity training…which was extremely valuable, but we can’t be putting ourselves in a position where we have to choose between the two. Our core workouts must be completed every day without fail, otherwise we’ll risk losing ground…or worse yet, we’ll start to plateau and get complacent. We have to keep pushing ourselves forward constantly, and with the way things are set up now I don’t see how that’s possible after we leave here.”

  “What do you mean leave?” Rafa asked.

  Greg spread his arms wide. “We’re to lead the military. When it gets built, do you really think we’ll be able to stay tucked away here training day in and day out?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” Jason said with a note of concern.

  “Neither had I,” Greg agreed, “until recently. But a more pressing concern is what are we supposed to do with the second class when they arrive. None of you need any hand holding, but they’re going to be newbs and our responsibility. How much training time do we lose dealing with them?”

  “If they make it
through to graduation,” Sara argued, “then they shouldn’t need any hand holding.”

  Greg looked over at her. “I would like to think that too, but are you willing to bet on that? If they were like us they would have already graduated 6 months ago. It’s taking them almost twice as long to get through the challenges than we did, so I’m not assuming they’re going to be up to par with us. And when they get here we have to incorporate them into some sort of structure because we’re not going to have the luxury of just ignoring them and hoping that they can train themselves. We’re the trailblazers, they’re not.”

  “By ‘structure’ I get the feeling you’ve got a recommendation?” Jason inquired.

  Greg nodded and dropped down into a crouch, placing a few fingers on the ground for unnecessary balance, bringing himself into eye line with the row of adepts sitting on the floor leaning back on the couches.

  “We have to make a decision right now not to hold back, or be held back, in our training going forward. Once things start heating up we’re going to be pulled in separate directions with conflicting priorities. We cannot let ourselves start making sacrifices. We have to be stubborn about our training because we’re the tip of Star Force’s sword. If we’re not sharp, we can’t expect anyone else to be. So rather than using us as do-it-all troubleshooters, we have to devise a different role for ourselves, separate from everyone else.”

  Sam leaned forward in his chair. “You’re worried that intermixing with others will dilute our effectiveness.”

  “Yes I am,” Greg said, standing back up. “We can’t let their liabilities slow us down. We have to remain free to push the envelope if we’re ever to stand a chance against the V’kit’no’sat.”