Julia sat on the sidelines of the fields, Walter sitting beside her after an hour of straight fighting. She’d dominated him in combat, the only element that he had any real control over wasn’t effective against her semi liquid form, not until it was hot enough that she was literally boiling. By that point, they’d likely be standing in air so hot that it’d kill anyone in the vicinity first before her.

Walter sat, staring down at the ground with a stunned expression, every few moments he would raise a water bottle to his lips and take a few gulps of water before returning to his gaze. Julia stealthily stared at the man, worried about just what he thought of her, of the fighting, and what he might say.

“Wow.” He said abruptly intoned. Julia’s anxiety peaked; the man’s neutral tone left everything up to question. She was ready for a scathing set of words, about anything really. She’d accrued insults of almost any kind, from the way she used her abilities, to how she now looked, even to those who seemed to want to deny her any humanity at all. She scrunched in on herself, the purple drawing into a deeper colour.

“That was awesome.” The man beside her said, lacking any of the punch that an insult would have. Walter, who she vaguely remembered from her conversation with Ajax, was still staring listlessly into space. It was as if she wasn’t even all that important, or rather, her horrifying form wasn’t important.

“Um,” she began nervously, trying to play down the crystalline sound of her voice that made her sound alien, “excuse me?” Walter’s eyebrows furrowed before his dark eyes flickered over to her darkened purple form, almost surprised to be addressed at all.

“I mean, that was awesome?” He half questioned, quirking an eyebrow at her, “You’re, like, really strong.”

There were no heated words or scalding comments. As Julia looked at him critically, she couldn’t find anything even remotely close to anger or frustration in the man’s expression. He was different than the others she’d fought against.

“I guess I am?” Julia said, hesitantly taking the compliment while she still searched for the moment, she’d see the flare of anger in her training partner’s face. But instead of anger, Walter grinned with a boyish excitement, wrapping his arms around his legs and pulling them into him.

“Come on, you’re more impressive than that!” He scoffed at her jokingly, turning a quizzical eye at her, “You can fuck with people’s very perception of their surroundings. I couldn’t tell what your link was until a few matches in. That’s a huge advantage!”

Of course, Julia knew this. She’d been abusing the advantage for months as she and her team slowly made it through training and the fighting that came with it. It was astounding how much damage you could do to someone when their very perceptions were being thrown off, and extremely few Linked had any real protection of the senses in that way.

“Have you guys been doing the whole ‘challenging’ thing?” Walter said, switching topics on a dime with a bubbly excitement, “‘Cause apparently we’re going to be doing that soon.”

A few silent moments cut through the budding conversation like a pair of garden shears. Walter turned towards the purple blob he only knew as Julia and found possibly the most genuine expression of mortification he could imagine on a featureless semi-liquid form.

Her form was pulled upwards, as if someone were pinching it and pulling it so, the front of her body—or what was facing him—was flattened with little ripples running across her surface.

“You’re what?” She demanded, “You can’t have even been in here a few months!” The warbling, crystalline voice shuddered against his body with a powerful vibration. It wasn’t loud, per se, but it was intense enough to make the hairs on his arms stand up straight.

“Uh, yeah? Around there. I haven’t been count–” Julia’s form just about faceplanted into the dirt, a muffled groan rumbling through her relatively small body, “–ing. Well, I’m imagining that it’s worse than I thought?”

“Worse than you thought?” She exclaimed, her tone almost combative. Walter almost flinched away from her as her voice rose in a fiery crescendo. She gave herself a moment, trying desperately to reassure herself that he wasn’t like the other trainees, like the ones she needed to be angry at.

“Look, I’ll explain it to you clearly.” She sighed internally, preparing herself to tell the man about the nightmare he was walking into.

“Huh,” Aaliyah said in half-amusement, “that seems like an abuseable system.” She shifted her weight onto another foot as she stared at her much shorter training partner. She knew vaguely about the team itself, she knew quite a few of the teams by this point, though she’d never been given much of a reason to learn names and home addresses quite yet.

“Well, yeah.” The other girl said, rolling her eyes with unabashed distaste, “All the teams are supposed to figure out amongst themselves who their challenge will be mutually. So, it’s abusable all sorts of ways.” Aaliyah laughed, flipping her golden locks over her shoulder, hair that was unfortunately just as enhanced as the rest of her body while she was covered in red spots. Even when the blue colour was there to counteracting the red, something Jamie assumed was to keep her sane, with the red obviously being rage.

“You could collude to have another team paired with a brutal one as payback, you could effectively force wins and defeats due to matchups, you could force teams into a random pool where matchups’ll be decided by random draw.” Aaliyah laughed, “Did they really think Linked were actually going to play fair?”

Jamie almost shivered under the larger woman’s gaze, even though she knew that she was strong enough to beat the other girl black and blue. Aaliyah, as Jamie had learned over the past hour, was scary for more reasons than just being strong. She was more than just strong, she was adaptable. Something that Jamie lacked herself.

It’d started happening somewhere in the first few minutes of really fighting each other. Jami was putting the other girl down into the dirt with an ease she hadn’t been able to replicate since the time they’d been put in a challenge with a newbie team.

“They were modelling it off of a school project.” Jamie shrugged, “But anyway, point is that you’re going to get smashed unless you’re able to pull a new team each week under your banner. And if you’re shit at fighting,” She let her eyes glance up and down the other woman’s body, as if appraising her muscle tone, “which you are, then no-one’s going to wanna fight you.”

“Why’s that?” Aaliyah said, eyebrow raised, “You’d think that people would have figured out how to bludge through training, at least with a system as crap as this.” Jamie idly scratched at the wall behind her, made of what looked like concrete but was actually some linktech derivative she’d forgotten to remember the name of. The only real difference was that, with concrete, she could just cut through it with the claws extending from her fingers.

“Well, some do but they never get any jobs.” She scratched gently at the wall behind her, the action hidden away by the massive sleeves that she hid them in. “They don’t say that they have internal rankings for Linked or certification, but they probably do. Rumour is that they have a hypercognitive that does it.” There was a slight shock of distaste on Aaliyah’s face, something that Jamie found herself agreeing with.

Jamie wanted to be away from the other girl, if she were being truthful with herself. It was something about the way that she had changed her tactics over the course of their hour of combat, the way that her skin had gone from almost being pierceable by Jamie’s claws, to being like trying to find purchase on a smooth, wet stone.

Not to mention that Aaliyah just felt dangerous to be around, and the scary part was that Jamie could only just feel it. She thought herself adept at reading for dangerous people, and it’d almost never failed her, not since she was a child, but now her senses were ringing with a soft sound, almost indistinguishable from her team.

“Isn’t that interesting…” Aaliyah mused, eyes narrowing while looking over Jamie’s form, slowly drifting up and down her body as if she could see right through her clothes and at the monstrosity that laid beneath them. Jamie gulped, feeling a wave of shame come over her with an accompanying redness to her cheeks.

“I guess we’ll have to see what we can pull off won’t we, little lamb?” Aaliyah’s voice rumbled lowly, before she turned away from her, walking to the locker rooms, and what Jamie could only assume was the bathrooms.

Jamie couldn’t close her eyes as she watched the tall woman walk away from her, her eyes trailing her form as her body moved in a seductive saunter. It was only after the woman opened the door to the locker room and disappeared within, did she finally manage to snap her gaze away from her training partner.

Jamie raised a balled fist to her head, thumping her forehead with the ball of her palm multiple times. Just adding another reason to the list of why she really didn’t want to be around the other girl.

“It seems that that the others are getting along.” Ren said casually, leaning up against the wall next to the much taller Greek man, though both of them were relaxed despite their brutal fights. Ren had quickly shown himself to be more than a worthy matchup to Ajax’s basic strength, the bare minimum that his axe would give him.

“Barely,” Ajax responded just as casually, glancing over to Walter who was chatting in hushed tones with Julia, and Jamie who now stood alone, “though Mirah and June seem to be getting along just fine.”

The two men summarily moved their gazes towards the two women who stood next to each other, not doing so much as moving, let alone speaking to one another. They seemed perfectly content to just wait out the allotted rest time in total silence with almost no interaction aside from the barest glances.

“It is better than a screaming match, yes?” He said, imitating a wise man’s voice with a distinct Japanese accent that only shone through on a rare occasion. Ajax huffed with a slight chuckle, grinning at the green haired man.

“God yes. Thankfully, we haven’t had any of those yet.” Ren recoiled, as if Ajax had struck him.

“Wait, your team hasn’t been in a screaming match yet?” The man looked scandalized, as if Ajax had insulted his mother. The Greek giant grinned widely, sensing the dramatics in the man’s tone.

“We’ve had our fair share of tense moments, but they are heavy and quiet.” Ren sighed, nodding his head and making the long green strands of grassy hair shake, the hair now leading all the way down to his waist now. The hair had actually been significantly reduced in size with a little bit of help from Ajax’s surprisingly sharp axe.

“My group just screams at each other. When June gets involved?” He closed his eyes and scrunched his face, as if bracing himself for an explosion’s shockwave screaming towards him. Ajax chuckled at the surprisingly expressive man.

“I bet it’ll happen to me someday. Hopefully I won’t be the one guilty of the crime.” Both men laughed together, quickly finding a companionship between them. After a while, Ren pointed to Ajax’s side, where the fireman’s axe was holstered to his side.

“Why haven’t you been using that in a fight so far?” Ajax thought for a moment, feeling at his side for the axe that had become just part of what he wore, more a part of his uniform than anything of any utility.

“I don’t know.” He stated frankly, easily pulling it out of its holster after unbuckling a strap and freeing it from its bonds. The axe almost hummed with pleasure, responding to an emotion inside of him that even Ajax wasn’t quite cognizant of.

“Well, it’s a part of your link, right? You wouldn’t be carrying it around everywhere I’ve ever seen you unless it was.” Ajax rose an eyebrow, trying to think if he’d ever noticed the green haired man walking by him at all, but drew a blank. Though, he discarded eh quiet suspicion and looked deeply at the slightly tattered red coating over the axe’s head, feeling the surprising heft of the thing in his hands.

It was only really a hand axe, as long as his forearm maybe, but not long enough to be of any extreme use in combat. It was pretty heavy and had a cutting edge, and he had even learnt how to use it in some situations with Willem, though that training had been relatively few and far between.

“I could,” Ajax said, feeling a more powerful thrum from his axe this time, “but I also feel like it’d be a little cheap. I don’t see anyone else wearing a weapon.” He gestured around the room, but Ren’s disbelieving expression knocked him down a peg.

“I can grow crazy strong, tactile grass from my head; Jamie has claws; Julia has, like, a bit of everything; and June can break physics, technically.” He barked out a single bubble of laughter, his eyebrows raised almost halfway up his forehead, “You’re the only one of us playing without a weapon right now, Ajax.”