Our footsteps were rolling thunder. Fifty people weaved through an abandoned street, dodging discarded cars. The ground trembled from our passing, clouds of dust whirling into the air. The all out sprint from the starting line had barely lasted until our full numbers had made it out into the testing area, then we’d taken a hard left, hugging the cavernous wall of the UCTZ while those outside of our alliance had rushed straight on into the concrete maze.

Running at a decent clip was no problem for me, but barely a minute had passed and I could see more signs of distress every time I checked over my shoulder. The usual tells of the unfit and untrained; wheezing breaths, red faces, sheens of sweat. Even Billy looked a bit alarmed, and his power should’ve let him keep this up for hours.

Reluctantly, I slowed the pace, keeping an eye on my tablet and the red dots we were slowly approaching. The first would come up soon, and I wondered which lucky bastard had been given an A-rank objective so close to the start.

My gaze strayed to the golden dots on my map, but I tore it away.

Instead, I focused on the immediate problems, the ones I could solve. A few taps brought up the contents of the upcoming task, and I frowned.

A: Locate and disable the villain hiding in a house on Algin Street.

No more information was provided, and I grimaced. By the looks of things, the dot someone had added was actually marking an entire street, rather than a precise location. Frustrating, but it couldn’t be helped. It would’ve been a thousand times worse to do this one alone.

“Listen up,” I had to shout over the rumble of our jogging steps. “We’re going to spread out and search the houses along the street near the first task! Split into groups of three, and do not leave each other’s side, even if it seems more expedient. There’ll be some kind of fake villain in there, and we don’t know if it’ll be a prop or something that’ll fight back. If you find it, call it out. If you hear someone else calling out, pass on the message. You all got that?”

There were some murmurs of agreement, and I took that as the best I was going to get. Groups started forming, and Billy moved up to my side.

“Wanna team up?” he asked, only slightly out of breath.

“Sounds good to me,” I said, speeding up a little. “We just need one more.”

“Julia?”

I looked around, scanning the group until I spotted her, then let out a sigh. She was running alongside a neat blond boy with glasses who moved with inhumanly smooth motions, and a girl with a cold gaze who was floating a little off the floor with her arms crossed. They seemed to be chatting amicably, utterly unbothered by the situation. “Seems she’s already found a group for herself.”

“You two—”

“Not important right now,” I cut him off. “We need—”

“A third,” a high-pitched voice piped up from my other side, and I spun to face it. A girl with catlike eyes and a Cheshire grin stared back at me, her orange-and-black hair flying way too wild for the mild wind we were running through.

Occasionally, the wind would catch her hair just right to reveal the pair of fluffy ears poking out from the top of her head.

“I’d like to offer my services,” she purred.

I decided not to comment, keeping my gaze firmly fixed to her own. “What can you do?”

“I’m a cat,” she said with a wink.

“I can see that. What are your powers?”

“Being a cat,” she said.

I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this person.

“And what can a cat do?” I prompted, turning my attention back ahead and upping the pace a little.

In lieu of a response, she started running on all fours. It looked so natural, I started questioning if that was the way human beings were supposed to be, forget all this two-legged nonsense. The thought burned through my neurons in a flash, leaving devastation in its wake.

“Anything else?” I asked, straining to keep anything from leaking into my voice.

She gave me a sceptical look, like I was the weird one. “Have you seriously never met a cat before? Look, if we find this villain in the house we search, I’ll scratch them up real good. That’s all you need to know.”

“Right. Any heightened senses or anything?”

Her cat-like eyes rolled, her fluffy ears twitched beneath her mane of black hair, and her whiskered nose sniffed haughtily.

“Dumb question?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Right.”

For once, the world had mercy on me, and we arrived at Algin Street before I had to endure any more conversation with the girl. The street was about as straight as they got in this place, curving only slightly before it linked up with another road at the end. Detached houses flanked the road, nine on each side, sitting at two stories of pale brick capped with triangular roofs of brown-red tile. The place had an uncanny valley effect, the houses too identical. Unnervingly unreal.

“I don’t suppose you have a sense that lets you pick up where the ‘villain’ is?”

The catgirl shook her head.

I paused. Calling her catgirl in my head felt a bit… I didn’t know what it felt, but I didn’t like it. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Catherine,” she said. “But please call me Cat.”

I stared at her.

She stared back.

“Of course,” I muttered, trying not to give in to despair.

Superheroes could be eccentric types. You just had to deal with things like this, sometimes.

Billy made a choking sound on my other side, but I studiously ignored him.

Slowing until my pace was only a little faster than a casual walk, I started calling out orders, assigning groups to houses. We didn’t quite have enough people to cover them all in one go, so I left the two houses at the far end of the road to my own group.

When I stopped speaking, there was a pause. Trepidation filled the air. No doubt everyone was wondering if they were the ones who’d end up dealing with some kind of villain, wondering whether it would be a genuine encounter, a challenge. It had been set up to provide an A-rank’s worth of difficulty to someone in this crowd, and I wished we’d had time to put names and powers to each task on our map.

Well. No use complaining about it now.

“Go,” I called, and everyone moved.

I burst into an all-out sprint, Billy and Cat following a moment later. I’d partially chosen the houses at the end for us because I was confident in our ability to cross the distance faster than most, and that faith proved founded. Billy’s massive strides ate up the distance like it was nothing, and Cat was as swift on all-fours as a cheetah. They overtook me in seconds, and I had to push myself so they weren’t left waiting for me at our goal.

“How do we want to do this?” Billy asked, voice low.

I took a moment to think it over as I caught my breath, staring at the house. Two stories like all the others, windows standing in symmetry on either side of the front door, which was itself placed almost perfectly in the middle of the house. “Approach from a blind spot as best we can. Scout around the perimeter, then check what we can see through the ground floor windows. Find a way in, then sweep the place, bottom to top.”

“Sounds good,” Cat said.

Billy nodded in agreement, determinedly not looking at the girl.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We circled the house first, keeping a distance. The rest of the house’s faces were basically the same as the front; four windows, two on the ground floor and two on the first equidistant from each other, with a glass back door that matched the position of the front one. There wasn’t really a perfect blind spot to conceal us if there was someone watching from within, but we approached the house from a diagonal anyway, aiming for the back right corner.

Cat took the lead, slinking across the back lawn like she’d done it a thousand times. Billy and I were clumsier, but it was hardly like stealth was the imperative objective. We reached the walls of the house without incident, at which point I took over and edged to the nearest window, down the house’s side. Leaning over to keep my torso hidden, I peeked around the corner.

No furnishings, no signs of life. Not even any electric wiring, as far as I could tell. It looked hastily thrown up, cheap. An empty shell. I got the impression these buildings were there more for the facade than anything else; the whole point of the UCTZ was providing an environment for prospective superheroes to train in avoiding collateral damage, after all. If you found yourself fighting inside a random house, you’d thoroughly failed.

All the same, it was a little creepy. The uncanny valley effect redoubled.

“Nothing inside,” I said.

I vacated my spot to let the other two get a look. After a moment, Billy spoke, “Do we still bother to go all the way around?”

“We should,” I began, but didn’t get much further.

“Stuff that,” Cat hissed. Without waiting for any input, she turned on a dime and bounded over to the door. After inspecting it for a moment, she held up a finger, the nail on the end extending into a feline claw. She smirked over her shoulder as she reached out.

“Collateral damage,” I said, but was summarily ignored.

The glass shrieked as her claw scraped over it.

“Stealth,” I said, but my voice went unheeded.

After a few seconds under her ministrations, there was a pop, and part of the glass panel started to fall away.

“Be careful,” I said, but I might as well have been a ghost.

With strength impossible for her size, Cat lifted the glass over her head and held it there, staring me in the eyes.

“At least put it down gently,” I begged.

Cat heaved it behind her, and the slab of glass went soaring to the other end of the lawn. It hit the ground edge-first with a heavy thud, and I almost thought it was going to stay that way.

Then it promptly fell over and smashed into tiny bits.

I sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

Cat entered the house first, and I had to crouch down to follow her. The room was little different to the one we’d glimpsed; a hard cement floor, bare walls that hadn’t even been plastered, the floorboards exposed on the ceiling. There weren’t even doors between the rooms.

A little exploration revealed a straight set of wooden stairs leading up to the first floor.

“Do we have to?” Cat asked.

“Worth checking,” I said.

Despite her doubt, Cat once again took the lead. Her steps made not a sound, silent as a tiger stalking its prey, but the wooden stair groaned in protest the moment I put my weight on it. The next few steps weren’t much better, and the sound reverberated through the house. I’d long given up on the element of surprise, but I still winced each time.

I was halfway up the stairs when I realised I should've been hearing much worse from behind me. I looked over my shoulder.

“Maybe I should wait down here,” Billy offered with an awkward shrug.

“If the ‘villain’ is here, we’re not getting the jump on them,” I said.

“I don’t think these stairs are gonna take my weight, Emmett.” He shuffled in place, eyes darting to anywhere that wasn’t me. “I’ve fallen through things before. Fuckin’ hurts, dude.”

I nodded, then continued on my way. The stairs were so loud I ended up throwing caution to the wind, taking them two at a time and arriving at the first floor in a second. The first floor was similarly unfurnished to the ground floor below, with one key difference: doors. The top of the staircase opened out onto a corridor that cut through the centre of the house, and there were two doors on each side. They were simple slabs of wood, handleless, but the change spawned a need for caution.

Because why would they install doors when they clearly cared so little about the interior of these houses?

Cat awaited me, frozen halfway through the corridor, her gaze fixed ahead. “Noise,” she whispered, all feline inflection gone from her voice.

My heart rate spiked, suspicions all but confirmed. “Where?”

“Back right.”

Lowering my centre of gravity, tensing to spring forward if I needed to, I started along the corridor. “Back me up,” I murmured. “Be ready for anything.”

Cat nodded, creeping forward beside me.

Seconds that felt like hours passed before I reached the door. I went still, stretching my senses to their limit, listening for any hint of what awaited us in that room. This close, even I could hear it. Something crunching, metal parts scraping, motors softly whirring.

This was it.

My heart was hammering in my chest, my fists kept clenching of their own accord, and there was a light feeling in my head, like I was floating.

And I couldn’t stop smiling.

It always felt good when a prediction came true. I’d thought it strange that an objective worth so many points had been located so close to the starting line. In fairness to the school, they probably just didn’t want the A-ranks to all be too close to each other, so there was inevitably going to be some that could be easier to reach than others.

That being said, if the exact location was going to be withheld, didn’t it make sense that they’d choose to place the test in the very last house? It was like a test within a test. If you went through searching the houses one by one, starting with the first, it’d take forever and very likely negate the benefit of completing an A-rank.

But if you thought about it like I had, trying to predict how the organisers would set things up? Aegis didn’t seem like the type of place to double-bluff, so starting at the end was the logical way to approach it.

I took a deep breath in through my nose, let it out through my mouth.

Of course, it went without saying that being right was only half the battle. We’d found the ‘villain’. Now we had to defeat whatever was ahead of us.

There was a force pulling on my body, something primal and intangible, urging me to act, and I indulged it.

I lunged forward, grabbed the corner of the door, and wrenched it open. Before whoever was inside could react, I darted forward in a fighting stance.

In the centre of the room, something rose.

And kept rising.

A mechanical construct like a cross between a bird and a mannequin with dozens of arms spread its wings wide enough that the tips touched each wall. The wings didn’t beat, but there was a high-pitched whine and a wave of static in the air, and it floated off the ground. Its blank face fixed on me, and it approached with a dozen hands held up, palms facing forward.

Plans roared through my mind as my eyes widened, barely daring to blink so as not to miss any little details. By the way its arms were tucked in, I guessed it was going to attack with thrusts. But that didn’t mean I could discount the wings; they clearly weren’t actually acting as propulsion, so I had to assume they could also be used to attack. It moved slowly, and there was no way it could get through the doorway without retracting its wings. That would have to be my plan: utilise my superior manoeuvrability, play keepaway until I figured out how to shut the thing down.

Those thoughts flashed by in the span of a second, and I lowered myself, ready to dodge whatever the mannequin threw at me.

Motors whirred, and I prepared for the villain’s attack.

Then Cat pounced over my shoulder and tackled the metal construct to the ground. Its motors screamed in protest as she pinned it. She lifted her hand, claws extended, and slashed at its face with ferocious strength and speed.

Its head popped off and went soaring across the room. Its wings flopped to the ground, and its arms went limp.

The ensuing silence was thick enough to drown a man.

Cat stayed crouched and leaned back on her haunches, looking down her nose at the ‘villain’. After a moment, she turned to me.

“I feel like that was too easy,” she said.

My eyebrow twitched.