We were betting on the assumption that the saboteurs wouldn’t risk anything approaching lethal force in full view of the tower, where teachers surely had to be waiting. Their dishonest antics had been given some leeway, to my frustration, but I wasn’t willing to believe that kind of escalation would go unpunished. Jeremy hadn’t. No reason these guys would.

As long as they weren’t trying to kill us, we could deal with it. Or so I hoped.

Our feet beat a cacophony as we ran, kicking up plumes of hazy grey dust. Our goal was ahead, but I was hyper-aware of our surroundings. My gaze didn’t stay on one spot for even a moment. I was constantly scanning back and forth, looking for any movement, changes in the scenery. Most of my attention went to the windows and roofs of the terraced buildings, but I couldn’t discount what was ahead of us. The bushes and trees weren’t enough to hide our group, but there could easily be one person concealed.

At the same time, I was keeping a keen eye on the positions of our group. Twenty in all, we’d formed into a kind of loose arrowhead shape, with me at the front tip, Billy and Cat behind each shoulder. Braver souls had fanned out to flank me, making up our vanguard, while others trailed a little.

Not everyone was running, I noted. One guy I recognised was sliding along a glowing blue strip he laid on the floor, hands in pockets, not needing to put any effort into moving along. Another was taking bounding leaps rather than sprinting. Even Helga was in her gaseous form, easily keeping up.

Not everyone was so blessed with their movement, wheezing and red-faced even though we’d barely made it halfway across the cobble ring. I made sure to set an even pace, leaving no one behind.

It was a lot to parse. I felt overloaded with information, barely able to pay attention to the movements of my own body.

And so I almost missed the first attack when it came.

Weight. Not just pressing down on me, but pulling on every part of my body. It was like the floor had turned magnetic, and every speck of my being had been transmuted to iron. I stumbled, tripped, almost righted myself. Then the effect vanished, and the sudden lack of pressure was almost more disorienting than its abrupt appearance. I tumbled to the ground, scraping my knees on hard, jagged stone.

Then the pressure came back, and I fell to all-fours.

Pain flared, but I ignored it. Grinding my teeth, I wrenched my head around, neck muscles straining against the heightened gravity, eyes scanning frantically over our surroundings. No sign of where the attack was coming from.

Dismissing that, I focused on our group. Most had fallen just as I had. A few had taken it better, some a lot worse.

Billy was still on his feet, but his entire body was shaking. Cat was pressed down on her stomach, legs splayed either side of her as she howled in rage. Even Helga, a living gas, had been pressed to the stone, her form going darker and more opaque where it was being compressed. Everyone else was in varying levels of disarray.

There was only one person still moving, sliding along his glowing blue zone like a hockey puck. I reached out for him as he almost drifted past me.

“Make your power’s effect as big as you can,” I rasped.

The boy was in clear pain, his eyes clenched shut, his teeth grit. But he opened one eye, strained to look around. He seemed dazed.

“Liam! Spread your power out to everyone!”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure if my words were getting through to him. But without any obvious action on his part, his zone expanded, flowing beneath us like spilled water.

I felt the effect immediately. The gravity pressing us down didn’t abate even a fraction, but that didn’t matter. Liam had given me a quick rundown on his power earlier, and from the way he described it, he could make a car move as if it weighed as much as an inflatable; light as a feather, but unable to gather any real momentum. Gravity meant nothing to him.

I had so many ideas for how he could use it. Later.

With but a thought from him, our entire group started sliding along the floor. Slowly at first, but we quickly picked up speed. Soon, we were moving as fast as a light jog, and the end of the cobble ring was rapidly approaching. We could’ve weighed a tonne each, and it wouldn’t have mattered. The pressure increased exponentially until my arms gave out and I was lying flat on the ground, but we kept moving without a hitch.

Then the pressure vanished, our saboteur evidently realising they’d been effectively countered. Liam dispersed his power a moment later, groaning like a guy who’d just rolled down a mountain.

In spite of my protesting body, I surged back to my feet immediately, checking our surroundings. We were on the very edge of the cobbled ring, scant metres away from the line dividing stone and grass. A few members of our group followed me in getting up, but most stayed on the ground.

Couldn’t afford that.

“Up!” I shouted, darting to the nearest prone form, the slick-haired boy with the water manipulation powers—Yamas, I think his name was. I picked him up under the armpits and heaved. “Up!’

He complied after a moment, and others moved to do the same. Cat was a lot less gentle about it, lifting people up by the scruff of their neck. Billy, to my surprise, was somehow worse, practically throwing people to their feet. Even Helga helped out, a disembodied voice seeking consent before she possessed their bodies and helped them climb to their feet with added strength. Smiling a little despite myself, I rushed in to do my part.

Within moments, everyone was standing, if not quite ready. Half the group looked drunk, but we couldn’t afford to linger.

I barely took one stop forward before a wall snapped upwards in front of me. I sighed.

“Bi—” A blur rushed past me, leaving a bone-shaking boom in its wake. It slammed through the wall like a wrecking-ball, chunks of rock spraying over the grass ahead of us. “—lly. Good job,” I said.

Billy patted some dust off himself, then gave a thumbs up.

No more walls rose up as we continued.

We moved as a group, crossing the boundary into what I was starting to think of as the second stage—and the most dangerous stage. Too much cover, too many places to hide, too much to keep track of. Every tree could hide an enemy, every bush a foe. Even the terrain itself could be dangerous, under the right circumstances.

The cobble ring had been a game of speed. We’d cut across it like a javelin. Now, we took evasive action, zig-zagging across the grass, using the foliage strategically to cut off line of sight without straying too far from our course to the tower. It wasn’t just a tactical thing; the park area didn’t really allow for a straight line. Setting aside the bushes and trees, which, though a pain, were easily dodged, the ponds pocking the landscape were the real problem. They hadn’t seemed so bad from a distance, but they forced us onto a winding route, killing time.

Thankfully, it didn’t take too much longer to get past them.

Unfortunately, our third attacker struck soon after. My assessment of the area’s dangers turned out to be prescient, though it came from an unexpected source.

I was in the middle of hurdling a knee-high bush when I heard multiple yelps of alarm behind me. I spun, ready to face anything. Of all the ambushes I’d thought we might face, the grass itself had not been high on my list.

It was growing with frightening speed, like a timelapse. Instead of reaching toward the sun like nature intended, the turf was moving with malicious intelligence, crawling up legs and tying them up, then moving to mummify our allies as they fell to the ground. The stronger among us were fighting back, and Yamas was even seemingly pulling the water out of the grass itself, turning it yellow and brittle, but plenty were being pinned to the ground.

I went to go back and help, but I felt the lawn latching onto my own feet, gripping me with a strength more akin to steel than grass. I tried to keep my balance, but it was no use. I fell, and green doom rushed up to meet me.

A shout tore its way out of my throat. “Yamas! The ponds!”

Waves of murky water flooded the area, and the grass was flattened beneath its weight. I fell face-first into a puddle instead of a hostile environment, sputtering and splashing for a second before getting my bearings and levering myself up.

“Sorry!” Yamas was holding his hands up with his shoulders hunched, like a turtle retreating to its shell. “I should’a done that from the start. I’m a dumbass. Sorry.”

I took a shaky deep breath. Shivers wracked my body—that water was fucking freezing—and the water had made me feel heavy, but I forced my way back to my feet. “It’s fine. Help everyone else up.”

It took a few minutes, but soon we had everyone out of the still-wriggling grass, and we could get moving once more.

Could was the operative word. I didn’t realise it until everyone else started complaining, but I wasn’t the only one who felt heavy, my limbs trembling.

We’d been hit by a double-attack.

It was similar to the gravity effect we’d faced at the start, but subtly different. The air had gone thick, like we were trying to walk through water. Everyone was affected this time, even Billy’s vast strength proved unable to overcome the effect.

It wasn’t enough to halt our movements entirely like the first attack, but it would have the less fit members of our group exhausted in seconds.

Helga’s cloud of green gas drifted into the corner of my vision, and my eyes jerked to her. She was making little sounds of distress, her smoky form twisting this way and that. This close, I noticed little stars twinkling in time with her voice whenever she made noise.

Not everyone was affected, after all.

My lips moved as if in slow motion. “How… many… can… you… control?”

The cloud flinched. “I’ve never even attempted this many.”

“Do… it.”

“I don’t know if what you’re thinking will work!” Helga sparkled with distress. Her accent was thick when she was agitated, but I couldn’t place it. Something Eastern-European. “My power is symbiotic. It’ll make you stronger. But I don’t know if it’ll affect this.”

“Try,” I said, staring her down.

She undulated in place for a moment, then the stars in her cloud shone with inner light as she screeched. My heart skipped a beat as I thought she was going to chicken out and leave us, but instead her cloud expanded, reaching out tendrils. She couldn’t cover all of the group in one go, and she always stopped to make sure everyone was okay with what she was doing, so it took longer than I would have liked.

But it worked.

The feeling of her power working on me was unlike anything I’d experienced. Worms wriggled through my veins, slimy sheets of plastic crawled under my skin, and countless little pin-creatures burrowed their way into my muscles. Despite the strange sensation, I’d never felt so strong. I held up my hands, marvelling at the shimmering emerald steam venting from my skin.

Can’t do this for long, a strained voice echoed in the back of my head. Also can’t control this many people. Can only boost. Please hurry.

“Everyone move!” I roared.

The impossible density of the air hadn’t gone away, but it felt milder. Weak enough we could push through it. Much like the gravity at the start, it faded once it became clear we’d effectively neutralised the effect, and I found myself wondering if it was the same attacker.

Helga stayed linked to us all even after it was gone, so we had to stick close together to remain in her range. With her boost and without any more hindrance, our pace doubled and then doubled again, and we blasted through to the other side of the park ring.

Our feet hit pavement. The tower was only fifty metres away.

And there five people in front of us, standing around in a loose mish-mash, more a group that happened to be in the same place and doing the same thing than an actual alliance. They were surrounded by bits of rubble that looked suspiciously humanoid, and a giant of a boy with neon grain hair was in the process of crushing a featureless stone golem beneath his boot.

“Took you guys long enough,” he said, his voice gravelly as a quarry. “We sorted these fuckers out for you. A bunch of them spawn when anyone enters the parking lot, but only so many at a time. They’re not tough, but annoying when you’re already getting sniped by other people out there.”

From all the way on the other end of the clearing, back in the alley, I hadn’t recognised them. Now I did. I knew them all.

The girl who’d pretended to stop to tie her shoelace. The boy with the vector powers. The girl who could fly. The girl who could see through walls, and the guy who could walk through them.

Their names hadn’t come up, for whatever reason, but their faces were unmistakeable.

They’d all been working with us, after all.

“You haven’t finished yet?” I asked.

“Does it look like we have?” the girl who could see through walls said, rolling her eyes.

Apparently, they hadn’t stopped.

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” the shoelace girl said. A little blue flame was dancing between her fingers. “I’m still here because of that Latina chick. I didn’t want to make an enemy for life, so I agreed to wait.”

“Not like our time score matters anyway, since we got all our tasks,” the boy who could walk through walls chimed in.

“Julia,” I said, pieces slotting into place.

She’d been one of the first to leave. I could only assume she’d gone ahead to the finish line to… what? Stand guard, like some kind of final boss?

“Where is she?” I asked, looking around.

The flying girl made a noise, drawing my attention. She was holding one of the training dummies by the head, a B marked on its chest, and she tossed it towards me. Reaching into a pocket, she withdrew a token, and threw that at my feet too.

“Finishing off for you,” the girl said with an icy glare.

My mind went blank. It felt like I’d been processing too much information, and my neurons had shorted out. My mouth flopped open soundlessly, then clicked closed. I repeated this performance for an embarrassingly long time before I managed a response.

“She finished my tasks?”

“Not all of them,” she replied. She floated up a metre or so and looked to one side

My stomach dropped as I followed her gaze.

The tower that held the finish line was undoubtedly the tallest building in the area, looming over the terraced buildings that ringed it. But that wasn’t to say it was the only structure of a notable height.

On the eastern end of the zone, for example, stood the red radio tower I was supposed to activate for my A-rank objective. It had to be ten stories tall.

The pillar of ash-grey smoke rising from beside it was much taller.