Guy Baker had never been a confident man. He had always felt younger, weaker, and lesser than even peers of his own age. He couldn’t quite put a pin in the exact moment that his perception of himself had become that way, but it had done nothing but increase as he went through life.

Maybe it was because he always felt out of place in the nice, inner-city suburbs that he grew up in. Maybe it was the lack of a father figure, or the handful of times that his mother had introduced a new boyfriend, only for them to break up a few years later, if they were lucky. Or it could just be that he had always stood out.

Now, though, he stood like a sore thumb, his presence in the private little room off the side of the Gym was so stark from those around him that it legitimately hurt to be in the same room.

“Are we really doing this Bax?” Lawrence said, adjusting the beanie on his head nervously. Lawrence, usually called Slip, was the only person brave enough to call Jeremy Baxter by any shortened name. Guy suspected that Jeremy only really kept Slip around for the novelty of it.

“Of course we are.” Jeremy replied even as his fingers tapped away methodically at his phone’s screen. It was the latest and greatest linktech phone, probably specifically augmented by Techtron too. Guy had never really gotten his hands on linktech, his mother only being so wealthy, but Jeremy’s every device or personal item had some sort of linktech component to it. The man’s suit was weaved with linktech fibres, for crying out loud.

“Won’t it, y’know, make us look weak? For beating on a bunch of freshies?” Slip said tentatively and Jeremy lifted his head from his phone for a moment, his blue eyes giving a very distinct unimpressed glare.

“If you really think I’m doing something that would harm my reputation, you’re a fool.” His voice was cold and hard, the voice he most often used when he wasn’t showboating to others outside his inner circle, if Guy could even be considered anything more than a lap dog.

“Really?” Slip said dumbly, “What’ll this do for our rep, boss?” Guy would have loved to scoff at the other boy, but Slip was the only decent person in the group, and even if he was acting dumb at the moment, messing with his act was a good way to lose the only person that would offer Guy any support.

“Fear, idiot.” Jeremy insulted, though it lacked heat, somehow making it even more intimidating. “We are amongst the next generation of Linked, the people who we’ll be dealing with, paying off, fighting and allying with. If we set it straight right now that we are willing to cross lines to hurt someone, and we won’t be punished?” Jeremy didn’t finish the thought, letting the rest of the room infer what he was getting at.

Guy let his gaze wash over the room’s inhabitants, though only briefly. Jeremy was fully decked out within his training and combat suit, the black, skin-tight ‘second skin’ only accentuated the wiry muscle the tall man possessed, the deep black of it contrasting against his pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes starkly. He had received the full suit a few weeks prior, before they’d been briefed on Jeremy’s plans to rough up the undefined team that everyone was talking about. The suit was protective, sure, but it was actually more about accentuating movements and power, a thin layer of extremely potent muscle covering the body, reinforcing almost every movement.

The black surface of the suit shone with a faint reflection of the lights, giving it an almost metallic look, along with it’s intentionally futuristic aesthetics. Guy had looked online for any mention of the suits, curious about the tech behind it, and found a few listings from Techtron that gave a product description, but the price was ladled as ‘Please contact seller.’ In other words, ‘Too expensive for you.’

Slip was standing a few metres away from Jeremy, being as close to his right-hand man as you could be without being an indentured slave. Slip was outfitted with a general protective body armour with limited linktech integration, just being the scraps that Jeremy had thrown him at a whim. Over top of the armour he wore his gold and silver hoodie with the brand name beanie sitting over top of his long, messy, brown hair. Slip was a better person than Guy’s other two teammates, though he wasn’t sure by how much. At least he wasn’t a massive douchebag like Jeremy.

The last person standing in the room, silently meditating on a nearby mat, was Terry Nguyen. He was slightly taller than Guy was, standing at five seven, but his musculature made him seem far bigger. Terry was physically elite, and exceptional in almost every way, even intellectually. Smart, powerful, and useful, which is probably why Ernest Baxter had the boy accompany Jeremy as a bodyguard and attack dog.

The man, even while just meditating, cut an intimidating figure—giving every impression that he was ready to jump into battle at any given moment. The Asian man, probably Vietnamese, was thankfully pretty neutral when it came to Guy, even if Jeremy was vocal in his distaste for the boy. Terry wore another skin-tight suit, though it currently hung around his waist, allowing Guy to see the intense amount of muscle the other man had. He didn’t even have a link that benefitted from physical training.

Then, that left Guy himself. Short at a middle-of-the-road five six, pudgy despite linked burning calories like nothing else. His short and curly hair and baby blue eyes only made him look weaker and frumpy in comparison to even the comically dressed Slip. He had always wondered where his features had come from, definitely not coming from his mother, and with her adamant refusal to tell him who his father was, he’d been left without that personal understanding in his life.

Now that he’d found it, he’d almost do anything to wind back the clock and avoid it at all costs.

Jeremy’s phone buzzed briefly, and the tall boy turned to put it in a secure locker within the concrete wall he was leaning on, turning to the rest of his team with a look of malice slowly dawning on his too-handsome face.

“Alright idiots, it’s showtime in fifteen.” The room quickly turned their attention to him, Terrence lifting himself from the mat and walking to join the circle they formed before combat. Terry took the direct opposite position from Jeremy, Slip taking the right, leaving only Guy to take the left-hand spot.

Guy walked over from his little hiding spot tentatively, kicking himself for looking even more like a prey animal to the room of obligate carnivores. When he finally joined the circle, Jeremy shot him a dirty sneer but continued with the planned speech.

“Slip, you’re going first against the tall blonde girl.” Slip’s eyes lit up, his lopsided grin barely holding back a dirty joke, “We don’t have a good idea of what she can do, but we know it’s tied to emotions and you can make her rage out if you annoy her bad enough. Set her off balance and restrict her as much as possible.” Guy’s eyebrow furrowed automatically before he could stop himself, drawing the ire of Jeremy’s hateful eyes. This drew the attention of the other two team members, Slip raising his eyebrow questioningly and Terry keeping his gaze impassive. With all attention on him, Guy stuttered out his question.

“Would– wouldn’t making her rage out be a bad idea? I know it’s an instant match over but she could get real dangerous if–” Jeremy sneered at him, the intense expression making Guy’s jaw close with a click.

“We have Domain as our referee, Guy. Shut your face.” Jeremy’s voice held a promise of punishment, and before Guy could even react, Jeremy’s hand blurred and caught Guy on the back of his head, knocking him onto the lightly padded ground just beside Terry’s feet. Guy quickly pulled in on himself, readying himself for a flurry of blows faster than he could react—his mind swimming so heavily that he couldn’t even focus enough to use his link.

“Wait, wait, Jeremy!” Slip called, the shadow of the top half of the elastic man covering Guy’s body, standing between the hair-trigger Baxter and Guy. “He’s going to be fighting for the team in less than an hour, we need him to be able to stand, J!”

There was a moment of tense silence as the distinctive buzz of Jeremy’s power hummed in the team’s ears, threatening them at all time.

“Fine. Get up, bastard.” Jeremy said after a long moment, and the word really cut deep, even if he had been called the insult thousands of times jokingly, somehow Jeremy made it into a real insult. Guy did as he was told, not daring to even look at Slip, though he no doubt had an apologetic expression on his face.

“Next,” the blonde-headed boy continued as if nothing had happened, “Terrence, you’re up against the Asian brat. He has control of fire, apparently a magic type link. Crush him.” Terry didn’t even nod, but Jeremy moved on. Guy wanted to know about the magic type link so bad, a subtle dream of Guy’s was to have Awakened with one, if he had ever Awakened that was. Now he was stuck with an undefined link, only adding to the ridicule and despise.

“Guy,” the voice was heavy with that same despise and burning malice, “you’re fighting against the chick with the fucked-up face. If you fuck up, I’ll make sure you get one just like it.” It took Guy a moment to remember who Jeremy was talking about, but he remembered the scar before long. With a slight nod, Guy could only hope that she was weak.

“I’ll be facing the axe idiot.” Jeremy finished, letting the team sit for a moment in silence, but finally adding, “Fuck them up.”

The Arena was huge. Way bigger than Aaliyah had remotely expected from the Underground, even after living out of the Gym for weeks upon weeks now. Aaliyah had seen the Arena and its smaller siblings on the map that she’d managed to socially engineer her way into getting through a quick email scam, but it hadn’t had any strict measures of size, only questionably scaled diagrams.

The Arena was the main stage, where many of the biggest fights between teams of Linked happened during training, usually between teams that had begun training roughly at the same time. While it wasn’t as big as the Gym in pure surface area, it made up for it by having branches of even more arenas, smaller than the main one, but used for smaller scale battles, and then even smaller ones with specific purposes.

And in this massive room, Aaliyah was standing just about in the centre of it. At the moment, it looked more like a traditional gladiator’s arena than anything modern, even though she knew that the Arena was entirely linktech, capable of changing and repairing its own terrain almost instantaneously if it was a pre-set arena schematic. Something one of the hypercognitives who had worked on the project was happy to spill after a back and forth for a few weeks while Aaliyah pretended to be a reporter for an exceedingly reputable scientific paper, doing a story about ‘Structural Linktech and the Future of Architecture.’

Now that Aaliyah stood inside of its walls, looking out the sizeable crowd that sat in the seats surrounding the circular Arena, she couldn’t help but feel anxious despite all the preparation and planning. Walter had pulled every piece of info they had on the other team, which mostly came from Ajax and herself, and had formulated a decent strategy for most of the matchups.

Though Aaliyah knew it was all going to fall apart in no time.

Aaliyah wanted so badly to hide her abilities and play the weakling, a position of power in it’s own right, but she was being pulled into these situations with almost no control over her own trajectory. She had just wanted to stay quiet and coast through training, then do some corporate jobs and disappear to nowhere. Walter, Ajax, and Mirah had other plans though, and they were going to take advantage of her reluctance to leave training, the only way for her to get out of the hole she had dug herself in life.

The crowd was pretty quiet for a group of people about to watch a highly advertised set of matchups, probably because everyone understood what this was. It wasn’t combat training or anything even remotely close to it, it was a declaration. It was a public beheading. Ajax had slighted them, and now Jeremy Baxter, son of the High Order, was going to crush them under his bootheel, and everyone was going to watch, even the AASAU was going to sit by and do nothing to help.

The crowd, previously entertaining themselves with quiet chatter hushed down to nothing as a boy shorter than Aaliyah walked out from on of the many entrances into the Arena. Other than the boy’s beanie, he was kitted out in protective gear more advanced than the standard-issue stuff that Aaliyah was currently wearing.

Simultaneously, two men walked out onto a balcony that overlooked the Arena. The distinctive forms of both Willem and the suited man they had met only hours before. The beanied boy ended up standing on his own designated spot, only five or so metres away from Aaliyah, as the smug, self-impressed voice of the suited man booming over a hidden microphone.

“Team A,” The man held his arm out towards the beanie kid, “versus Team B. This will be a one of one match with all matches completed regardless of win loss ratio. This match will be overseen by trainer Willem and Domain.” As the voice stopped booming from the walls, a bright glow covered the entire space of the Arena with a green sheen, before dropping back into its regular sandy tone. Aaliyah didn’t know what had just happened, and she could only assume that it was the link of the suited man who called himself Domain.

She didn’t like this.

She didn’t like it at all.