“They’re fighting.” Chef signed in his heavily abridged version of sign language that only he and his closest friend could really decipher.

The shorter man gave Chef a long, suffering look, using one of his extended arms to wipe at his forehead as he looked around at the rest of the kitchen hands who were working away at their orders. He forced his hands into action, not quite as quick as Chef was capable of, but fast nonetheless.

“Man, they’re always fighting! All the new teams fight like crazy; some even go physical. You know that!” Chef’s elegant jaw clenched as he grimaced, almost as if he were in actual pain.

“No, this is serious. Deathly serious.” The shorter man was ready to fire back with any number of flippant responses before he saw the other man’s face. With his own grimace, he groaned loud enough that some of the other employees turned to look at him.

“What do we even do about that? We can’t do shit!” He gestured with his inhumanly long arms, coming just shy of knocking a plate off of a table in the process, though neither of the men cared to point it out. Chef looked around the room, his tightly woven bun barely moving even as his head whipped from side to side, before returning with pleading eyes.

“Milkshakes?”

“They’re fighting” Ren pointed out subtly as his own team sat at their table, eating the same meals that they had for months at this point. It seems that they had all fallen into a habit with food, and they almost never deviated, except for dinners. Today, Julia had come to sit with them during the lunch period, in between their training.

It was something that Ren had been surprised by, but he didn’t say that of course. Julia’s confidence was a fragile thing, and a poorly thought-out comment could easily send her back into her reclusive tendencies. It wasn’t hard to guess why that might be, especially with the fallout from the Baxter incident as a whole.

“No shit, Sherlock.” Jamie mumbled through her food as she watched Walter jump up from his chair, his warm skin almost burning red with actual anger. Jamie was not the greatest at reading someone’s emotions, but she was good enough to tell that Aaliyah had said something that had really gotten to the rest of the team. Not that it surprised Jamie, the only one in her own team that has had to deal with the woman for any length of time.

She was a poker and prodder, socially, and it could be surprisingly difficult to keep her mouth shut around her. She was also pretty good at getting under Jamie’s skin—or scales, she supposed—but it was always a subtle art for Aaliyah, making Jamie mad but not too mad. Too many were great at taunting people into actual anger and getting their asses beat when they pulled a bunch of power out of nowhere.

Julia’s vision was stuck on Ajax, which had been embarrassingly common over the course of the day before. She wasn’t usually one to swoon over someone so hard, maybe when she was in primary school, but after that first, almost obsessive, love she found herself difficult to attach the idea of romance to someone. But Ajax felt different, and maybe that was why it actually pained her to see the expression of hurt on his face.

She wanted to help, somehow, but it was an internal argument between teammates. Other teams stepping in, or trying to mediate, usually had disastrous effects, so the large majority of trainees just left the new team on the block alone for as long as possible. Let them acclimatize and figure out what their team looks like.

“Should we…?” Her voice rang out with its crystalline quality, something she’d started feeling more pride in once she started singing, like Ajax had suggested. There was a big difference between her singing, and her replicating sound and playing it back. Different parts of her brain, or whatever she had after her morph.

“No.” June’s voice whispered, and while she wasn’t the leader of the group, everyone listened. Ren was making to elaborate, the de-facto translator for the softly spoken woman, but June did away with the intermediary in a surprisingly spiel of words.

“There is something else going on, and Aaliyah is revealing it. This is important.” They looked back to the table and realised that June was right. Walter had sat back down in his seat and, after only a few short words, his face warped into a dark mask that Julia could barely force herself to look at.

Julia tried her hardest to keep her curiosity to herself, but when your entire link, and even your body structure itself, is built around the understanding and replication of sound, curiosity quickly led to her hearing every word that was said within the room. The words said only moments before were still present enough to hear their reverberations, and Julia’s mind expertly reversed engineered them into the words that Aaliyah had said. A blessing and a curse; with the ability to almost rewind a recording to a few moments before, Julia was able to catch sounds and words that she immediately wished that she’d never heard.

Her purple body constricted into a more compact, dark ball, even as her mind listened in on their conversation further.

The rest of the team noticed immediately, and Julia’s reaction was enough to tell them that it was way worse than just a fight. June was right, and even she felt prickles of worry at the back of her mind, her eyes set on the partner that she’d been training with for at least ten hours at this point.

She liked Mirah. They both weren’t talkative, and there was no real camaraderie or intrigue between them. In fact, their interest in each other was so minimal that it reduced how much June herself took interest in her own past. With Mirah there was no subterfuge, or any real goal from a social perspective. Their relationship was as simple as possible, pure in its ultimate simplicity.

To learn, to fight, to win, to grow. There was no other motive.

Yet June could see it in the other woman’s piercing green eyes. It wasn’t fear, or even anger. It was a judgement, her mind a scale in which ideas, items, and people were weighed upon.

“Finish eating,” June said softly, “we will arrive at the arena first.”

The rest of the team nodded, forcibly ignoring the other team as they were each served a large milkshake, an item that Jamie specifically knew wasn’t on the menu, and couldn’t be put in as a special order, despite her desperate attempts to get her hands on one in the early days of training.

They walked to the arena B-3 in silence, arriving and standing within their own little rings without a word. The trainers were all there, Osmium, Tracker, who both teams knew just by word of mouth, and then Willem, who was more of a mystery, though Osmium certainly seemed to know the other man.

Their faces weren’t as morose as Ren’s team, but they were aware of the situation at the very least. Ren was used to the idea of trainers spying on their teams, especially with the teams that had more funding behind them. Exactly how survived their partner team, really was couldn’t really be determined. But enough that when Ren saw Tracker’s back straighten, whispering covertly to the stocky man beside her, he knew that the other team was en-route.

Only a minute later the other team walked into the arena, and immediately the tone for today’s latter half of training was set.

Any light-heartedness was gone, though not replace by anger. Anger was unproductive when it came to teamwork, to shared goals. Ren watched on as they walked to their spots opposing his own team members, then as Ajax himself walked to his spot his eyes connecting with Ren’s own.

“Hey, Ren.” He greeted, though there was none of his usual jolly smile or calm tone. Ren nodded back in a cursory greeting as he watched the massive man smoothly remove his fire axe from the holster at his side, the worn wooden handle sliding up the side of Ajax’s thickly muscled leg.

Ajax pulled at the axe, releasing it and allowing it to rise through the air unimpeded, with Ajax’s hand there to snatch it into his grip once it’d come to a reasonable height. Before, Ajax would have been almost shy of drawing the axe, careful with what was undoubtedly a weapon that could kill someone against someone who seemed to have no weapon at all.

Ren didn’t comment on the hypocrisy, because he’d done the same with his hair, turning the organic leaves into what amounted to a secondary muscle system atop his own. A suit armour and a weapon at the same time.

It seems that whatever Aaliyah had said, was their impetus.

Their impetus to evolve.

The fight began without the need for a signal, Ajax brandishing his axe with a decisive mind, and Ren letting the powerful blades of hair flow from his scalp unrestricted.

He’d need it.

Tracker watched on as the two teams clashed, combat beginning until there was a conclusion, and then repeating once again.

She stood in line with Willem and David, all of them analysing what was happening before their eyes in silence. Usually she’d make a small quip about the carrot and the stick, or about the team finding their motivation, but she just couldn’t pull it from herself as she watched them fight.

Their fighting hadn’t become desperate, so much as focused. She’d analysed all their fights, back to front, a duty of her job that she was good enough at that she enjoyed it. But their fights had always been lacking in some way and lacking something important too.

Realism and danger.

Two things that were extremely difficult to simulate in an environment where the trainee themselves knew, deep down, that if something were to go terribly wrong, their trainer would be able to intervene. This had been dulled slightly for the fights against Baxter’s team, but it’d been so sudden, and they had found themselves with no real motivation to do anything but survive. Any notion of winning had been totally foolish.

So now, the trainers were almost enthralled.

They saw the real grittiness behind their fights, all of them breathing in the air and finding it scented with the blood of battles that they themselves had been involved in, once upon a time. Even the other, far more mature, team didn’t quite have the same level of seriousness as Willem and Tracker’s did.

A few things pinged in Tracker’s mind, the ideas for just what had changed their demeanour to this degree. She was good at retaining information, especially about the individuals she worked with.

Aaliyah Flinn, the daughter of the Monarch.

Mary and Richard Suen, Walter’s parents, and a duo of fantastic lawyers.

Tracker noted down in her mind that the information had made it to the team. Information that Tracker had originally thought would manage to allude them for long enough. After all, she had expected Aaliyah to want out of the team since the beginning.

Tracker was wrong. Very wrong. As she looked over the recordings of the cafeteria feed within her memory, she could see just how the conversation went down, almost able to trace the exact words that Aaliyah had used to pose it to her team.

One of the fights took a turn, with the usually jolly Ajax now wearing a mask of stoic determination, not to dissimilar from Willem’s when he gets worked up. It had been fifteen bouts now, where Ajax had been using his axe with what many would think was reckless abandon.

But instead, each blow was filled with an almost strategic power. Before, when he’d used his axe in combat, he’d played with it as if it were a tiny shield, blocking and throwing in a hap hazard swing on a rare occasion.

But now, he was almost terrifyingly aggressive with it in his hands. It threw off Ren Ikari’s usual strategy of cautious aggressiveness, forcing him back harder and harder. Though it wasn’t just the actual danger of the axe that Ren was restricted by, with it cleaving into his grass-like hair and cutting it short multiple times, forcing him to discard his armouring for moments at a time and leaving him vulnerable.

It was also the threat of his axe that Ajax seemed capable of using with surprising mastery. With a single swing at where Ren’s arm would be, if he were to throw a punch, Ren was forced to take another action to protect himself instead—limiting options more and more as the fight went on.

The three trainers watched on, one of which took a keen interest in Ajax’s fight as he slowly cornered the green haired man. Osmium’s eyes glittered, like a hawk spotting movement from a mile away. Tracker could swear that she saw Osmium’s muscles twitch with Ajax’s movements, his usually dull expression flickering between a moment of delight when that image he held in his mind was adhered to, and grimacing when it was strayed from.

But in the final moments of this fight, Tracker allowed herself to look away from the fight to glance at the legendary Linked, and saw a small grin on his face as his expression almost seemed to sing with approval.

When she turned back to the fight, only the last blow was left. All of Ren’s options had been literally cut off, his green hair still desperately trying to regrow fast enough to supplant the rest of the hair that he was trying to remove from around his body as it did so.

Ajax pushed the other man to the ground, and crouched next to him, resting the back of the axe’s head on his muscled shoulder and placing a large hand on the man’s chest.

Ren grimaced, and Tracker knew that it was over for him, even as his hair continued to grow at a rapid pace, even if it was slowing from when he’s started the battle.

“It’s over, Ren.” Ajax’s voice boomed, carrying through the room as he looked at the other man stoically. There was no anger or derision in the Greek man’s voice, but there was a regal command to it, like a commander putting his soldiers at ease in the middle of a war.

And when Tracker observed the effect of his words on the rest of those who fought, she realised that her analogy might just be more accurate than she thought. The other’s didn’t so much as look at their teammate, even after his success, but they sure showed that they had heard him and his message.

Both of Walter’s palms spat pillars of fire, chasing the agile form of Julia; Aaliyah’s form grew tight, constricting her impressive height into a more compact stance, relying far more on the combat training that Willem had given then than her usual formless blows; and Mirah…

Mirah’s eyes burned with the bright webbing of gold lines. Each of her matches only lasting a moment.

But Tracker didn’t miss the significance of her very next match, when it had instead lasted two moments, the towering June being evaded by the girl who couldn’t even track her with her eyes.

All the trainers knew, in that moment, that they were watching the birth of something special, something more than they’d expected. What it was, exactly, was something that could only be discerned in time.

And Willem?

Willem could wait. Even as his mind slowly began to move on ideas that he’d abandoned years ago, written off as fanciful dreams.

But Willem would wait. He was good at waiting.

For as long as they needed.