Free Web NovelChapter 40: The Climb.
『"There’s always gonna be another mountain to overcome..."』
The alarm went off at half past five in the morning, just like it had done so for the past fourteen days.
Amara laid face-down on her bed, unable to move an inch and wondering why she ever agreed to an intensified training.
The knowledge that there was still one more week of this only deepened her misery.
However, her will to improve was far greater than any pain or uncomfort she was feeling or would feel.
She forced herself upright through sheer spite and stubbornness. If she could survive Professor Ayala’s constitutional exam, she could damn well survive this.
Her device buzzed with the morning schedule and all she could see when she squinted at the screen was Eighteen hours of pain staring back at her.
She showered fast, dressed faster, and made it to the relaxation center which had officially replaced Hiro’s room as their main gathering spot in the Institute.
Speaking of Hiro, he sat slumped on the couch, looking like he’d just carried the One Ring to Mount Doom and back. Twice.
"Dude," he announced to the room at large, "it’s Saturday."
"Your point?" Sophia asked without looking up from her breakfast construction project.
"My point is... it’s Saturday." He gestured vaguely at the room then groaned, blinking slowly. "Also, should I be concerned that I can taste colors now?"
"You’re fine," Sophia said, carefully balancing another piece of toast on her fortress of food. "You’re either experiencing minor neural rewiring from training, or you’re having the worst hangover ever without the fun drinking part. Either way, it’ll pass."
She continued constructing her elaborate food arrangements which involved eggs, bacon, toast, three types of cereal, and what appeared to be an entire cantaloupe?
"Toss me a beer," Raj called from a sofa.
Sophia grabbed a can from the mini-fridge and alley-ooped it across the room.
Raj caught it one-handed without looking, cracked it open, and took a long drink.
Amara raised an eyebrow. "It’s five-thirty in the morning," she pointed out.
"And?" Raj wiped his mouth.
Just then, the elevator chimed and Ethan stepped out, already dressed in his training gear, arms folded across his chest. "What are you guys still doing here? You’re all late," he observed.
Amara checked her device. "We’re five minutes early."
"Like the Director always says," Ethan replied with a serious expression, "early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable." He cracked a small smile. "Do you want Dante to make us run extra laps?"
Sophia was putting the finishing touches on her breakfast masterpiece when she replied, "Dante can go suck it."
Amara felt something rebellious spark in her chest. She looked Ethan dead in the eye and said, "Yeah. Dante can do the... the sucking. Of it."
The silence that followed was profound.
Hiro immediately lost it, laughing so hard he nearly fell off the couch. "Did you just—"
"That was terrible," Sophia said with a grin.
"I was attempting solidarity!" Amara protested, feeling heat rise to her cheeks.
Ethan chuckled lightly with an eyebrow raised as he met her eyes from across the room, and despite how exhausted she was, something warm fluttered in her chest.
They’d been dancing around each other for weeks now. Training together late into the night when everyone else had collapsed into bed.
They had conversations that lasted until sunrise about everything and nothing, and there were moments where they’d stand too close, neither pulling away during combat drills.
But they hadn’t crossed that line yet. Hadn’t acknowledged what was building between them beyond the synchronization of their weapons and the way their Awakener energies seemed to resonate when they fought together.
Tonight, Amara thought. After Yelena’s drills. Tonight she’d—
The elevator chimed again and Dante stepped out. "Morning, dreamers!" He frowned. "What the bloody fuck are you still doing here!? You’re all late!"
Ethan turned to look at the group with an expression that clearly said "I told you so" without speaking a word and they all shrugged in unison.
"Let’s fucking go!" Dante clapped his hands together like a demented cheerleader, already herding them toward the elevator. "Move it! The training grounds won’t torture you by themselves!"
"Wait," Sophia said, turning back to her breakfast fortress. She grabbed the entire plate and brought it into the elevator.
"You’re bringing that?" Hiro asked.
"You think I wasted all that time for nothing?" She took a toast from it and bit into it.
***
Once they got there, the training grounds had been reconfigured into what could only be described as an obstacle course designed by someone who probably never got any candy during his childhood on Halloween.
There were walls to climb, gaps to jump, ropes to swing from.
And underneath everything was a pool of water that Maya had helpfully informed them was "cold enough to cause immediate hypothermia if you fall in, so try not to fall in."
"The goal," Dante announced with a sadistic grin, standing at the course’s entrance with his arms spread wide, "is simple. Complete the course while I make everything harder."
Hiro let out a slightly unhinged laugh. "He said harder! Like this could possibly get harder!"
Dante walked to a control panel on the wall and placed his hand on a large dial.
"This," he announced, "controls gravity in the training zone. Right now, you’re at normal. One times Earth’s gravity. Comfortable, isn’t it?"
He twisted the dial clockwise and Amara’s knees buckled as her body weight suddenly doubled.
"That’s two times," Dante said cheerfully. "Let’s see how you handle four."
He twisted again, quadrupling it, and it suddenly felt like someone had strapped a car to her back.
"That kind of harder. Go!" He stepped back from the panel, arms crossed as he watched from a platform that gave him full view of the course.
Amara in the past two weeks had learnt to channel her Awakener energy to enhance her body and even create her own leverage as she saw the second and third years do earlier.
In this state, she was able to use that energy and push herself toward the first wall despite her legs screaming in protest from carrying four times their normal load.
Behind her, Raj and the rest also channeled their energy.
He was already charging forward, his raw strength more than compensating for the extra weight.
Ahead, Hiro had activated his boots and was blur-sprinting, but the gravity kept pulling him down mid-jump, making him crash into obstacles.
Angel’s Bane manifested in Amara’s hand and she used it to cut handholds into the wall, literally carving her path upward as she hauled herself to the top.
Halfway through the course, she looked back and saw Sophia struggling badly. The helmet’s mental abilities didn’t help with physical obstacles, and her telekinesis was still too weak to lift herself. She was going to fall—
Ethan’s shield materialized beneath her feet just in time, a platform of translucent blue energy that lifted her to the next section.
"No helping!" Dante called out cheerfully, then twisted the dial even more clockwise, causing gravity which was already four times to double.
Amara hit the platform hard, barely catching herself. Her arms felt like they might tear from their sockets.
What kind of sick monster would put people through this? She thought to herself.
But she forced herself forward, cutting through obstacles in her path.
She was halfway through when her body finally said enough. Her legs gave out completely, and she crashed to her knees on a narrow beam.
"Get up," Dante said, his voice was the last thing she wanted to hear.
"Your enemies won’t wait for you to catch your breath."
"Please," Amara panted, "shut up."
"Better." He grinned. "Anger is fuel. Use it."
Amara pushed herself up through pure spite, stumbled forward, and somehow made it to the end of the course. After which, she collapsed immediately, barely able to see anything and completely out of breath.
Raj finished ten seconds after her, followed by Hiro, who made it across the finish line and immediately rolled onto his side, curling into a ball.
Ethan carried Sophia across on a shield platform, which technically counted as completing the course even if it violated the spirit of the exercise.
"Pathetic," Dante announced happily, reducing the gravity back to normal. The sudden lightness felt like floating. "Thirty-seven minutes. My grandmama could do better, and she’s been dead for fifteen years."
He clapped his hands together. "Again. Faster this time. That’s what you get for being late to your own torture session."
Hiro raised his index finger up while his other hand clutched his knee as he stared at the floor. "I—I’m too exhausted to even make fun... of how he said... ’grandmama’," he said, hyperventilating.
They ran the course six more times. By the end, Amara couldn’t feel her legs. But she eventually shaved two minutes off her time.
And more importantly, she could feel it. That second bar on her ribs, the one that had been dormant since she awakened, was starting to flicker in and out of existence. Almost ready to manifest fully.
***
By midmorning, they’d moved to Maya’s training hall, which offered a completely different atmosphere.
Where Dante’s sessions were chaos, pain, and fighting through obstacles, Maya’s training was precise, controlled, focused entirely on Spirit Weapon manipulation and the refined molding of Awakener energy.
The hall had been divided into individual training zones, each one designed for a specific type of development, and Maya’s ways were as usual, unorthodox.
"Ethan, you’re already past the basics," Maya called from where she supervised his section. "Work on layering. I want to see five simultaneous shields, each one capable of stopping a different attack type. Energy, physical, mental, and environmental."
In his zone, multiple translucent barriers flickered into existence around him, each one a different shade of blue and humming with a distinct frequency.
Meanwhile, Raj laid beneath a contraption that allowed him bench press what probably weighed a hundred tons, maintaining the partial enlargement of his arms while doing it.
In his training zone, Hiro summoned his boots. They locked around his calves with a sound like a thunderclap as red lightning immediately crackled up his legs to his knees.
"Speed is one thing," Maya told him. "Control is another. I want you to run that circuit..." She pointed to a complex path marked out on the floor with glowing lines. "...and stop at each checkpoint for exactly one second. Not point-nine seconds. Not one-point-one seconds. Exactly one second. If you’re off by even a tenth, start over."
Hiro stared at the circuit. It had seventeen checkpoints, multiple sharp turns, and what looked like deliberately placed obstacles.
"You’re kidding."
"I don’t kid about training," Maya said. "You may begin."
Red lightning exploded across the floor as Hiro took off, moving so fast he was almost a blur. He hit the first checkpoint, tried to stop, overshot by three feet, cursed, and had to start over.
In front of Sophia was a needle and thread, a jar of honey, and two dice arranged on a table. Apparently, these were all tools to sharpen her telekinesis according to Maya.
The idea was to thread the needle telekinetically to improve her precision, and for the dice, she was supposed to accurately get the number given to her by Maya by ensuring the dice landed on it when tossed.
As for the jar of honey, Amara had absolutely no idea what that was for.
In her zone, Amara practiced cutting increasingly complex targets. Maya would generate objects and Amara had to slice them in specific ways.
Cutting the apple without touching the core. Severing the rope without damaging the beam it was tied to. Pierce through the dummy opponent without harming the hostage that’s being held in front of it.
Her control for her selective cutting was improving. The cuts were becoming more precise, more intentional. She was learning to choose what the sword cut instead of just swinging and hoping.
By the time Maya called break, Amara was smiling like she could have kept going for five more hours easily. This type of training felt right in a way the obstacle courses never did.
"You’re getting there," Maya said, offering Amara a water bottle. "The sword’s responding faster. You’re starting to understand it instead of just using it."
She looked across the training zones at all five of them. "You’re all really amazing, honestly. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time until you guys hit Shaper, and Ethan becomes a Tyrant."
Amara took a long drink of water, then asked the question that had been nagging at her. "What does it feel like? The moment you rank up. Does it hurt?"
Maya’s expression turned distant, almost nostalgic. "Well... it’s like everything clicks into place. Like you suddenly understand a language you’ve been hearing your whole life but couldn’t speak."
She smiled. "Your weapon stops being a tool you wield and becomes an extension of your will. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’ll know it when it happens. Trust me."
Amara nodded, staring at her hand where Angel’s Bane had vanished, still feeling the phantom weight of the blade.
"Amara," Ethan called from across the hall. "Same time tonight?"
She looked up and met his eyes. "Definitely."
They’d been meeting after the official training ended for extra practice sessions that were technically optional but had become their routine.
And maybe Maya was right, especially with the part about not being scared.
Right there and then, Amara had made up her mind. After Yelena’s gruesome drills were over, tonight, she was going to make her move.
