“Jesus Willem,” Tracker said as she watched over Mirah and Aaliyah’s bout, “you’re really laying into them.” Willem snorted absentmindedly, watching the bout intently as the two team members went at each other with a ferocious speed that he’d hammered into them. They weren’t allowed to use their links for the duration of these hand-to-hand matches, though it wouldn’t be long before they’d be using their links in practice.

Mirah, now capable of controlling when she was and was not using her link, had become surprisingly adept at hand to hand. The willowy, emaciated girl that had first walked into Willem’s training area had transformed into a girl with a fair amount of muscle and a good eye for combat in general.

When Tracker said that Willem was going hard on the trainees, she wasn’t wrong. Usually, Willem found that giving his trainees as much time to acclimate before the harder, more gruelling training began was a boon. Two months or so wasn’t all that uncommon, especially when many were coming to grips with being Linked at all.

But this little team of Undefineds don’t have the time, and it was clear that they knew it.

Willem had taken almost complete control over their schedules over the past week, filling it entirely with rigorous physical and mundane combat training. The team hadn’t uttered one word of complaint, other than the groans of pain and short sentences of weary frustration.

Willem watched as the decisive moment was made, the movement that would lead to the match’s winner. Aaliyah stretched out with a punch, seeking Mirah’s padded jaw, but instead found thin air. Mirah, being astoundingly good at recognising weaknesses, moved into Aaliyah’s guard, grabbing hastily at the offending arm, and twisting her body so she could throw Aaliyah’s much taller body over her back and onto the floor with a mighty whoosh.

The match was over, Willem easily deciding it in Mirah’s favour. The team had been performing these quickfire matches continuously for almost four hours now, exhausting them both mentally and physically in a way that running around a track or using exercise equipment couldn’t quite reproduce.

Mirah stood, her face up to the ceiling while breathing heavily, sweat poured off of her light brown skin, having already soaked through any and all clothing and protective equipment she was wearing. Aaliyah was much the same, though she laid on the ground, blond hair splayed out around her having fallen out of the tight bun she kept it in during training.

Aaliyah hit the padding beside her with as much might as her weak body could produce without adding her link to the mix, growling with frustration, and adding a few choices swears before stumbling to her feet and walking off to a secluded corner of the training area.

Mirah looked about ready to reach out to the girl, or to try stop her, but Ajax subtly intervened. Although he whispered in her ear, not intending for any to hear, Willem had exceptionally good hearing.

“Just let her go, she needs to cool off for a minute.” Ajax’s much larger form easily impeded Mirah from leaving his grip on her shoulder even if she wanted to. She gave a stoic nod and removed herself from the padded flooring, allowing Ajax and Walter their bout.

Willem watched on as the comically size disparate duo began their duel, something that had become a much more interesting sight in recent times as Walter gained an express interest in grappling and holds.

“When will they be ready for real combat training?” Tracker said from beside him, clearly having gotten tired of waiting for the stocky coach to answer her previous question. Willem gently picked underneath his nail with another; the thoughtful action hidden beneath the bicep of his crossed arms.

“Tomorrow.” He said finally, making the dark brown skinned woman give him a look of consternation.

“This soon? As soon as you put them in combat training they’ll be open to challenge.” Tracker warned, but Willem only let his grey eyes flicker over to Tracker’s for a moment before returning to the match.

“I’m not a dunce, Tracker.” He held out a long pause as Walter managed to trip Ajax and put him on the floor, hastily putting the much larger man’s arm in a painful hold, “But they don’t have time to waddle about and get ready. The trainee program is at capacity and Baxter’s team has too much leverage to pull for me to fight back against it for long.”

Tracker’s phone beeped with a message, prompting her to pull it out from her pocket and quickly reply while she talked with an almost absentminded tone.

“Has the timeline changed?” Willem nodded, letting Tracker finish typing the message and send it. She turned on the man in full now, her expression prepared to take the bad news. “How much?”

“Two months.”

As prepared as Tracker was, she still couldn’t quite defend against the wave of resignation Willem’s answer provoked. Two months was barely time enough for anything, let alone training a team to a level that would be at all acceptable in the long term. The fact that many in the team had made so much progress in their links in the short time that they’d been training here was almost astounding, especially with Mirah revealing a whole new side to her own link, a massive step forward.

Baxter’s team was hardly even the sole worry at this point. The real worry is what would happen when they got outside of the AASAU, when they were truly exposed to the world and all its dangers, dangers that even fully trained up Linked constantly die to, let alone a group of glorified children who’ve been trained for all of three months and some change.

“Don’t worry.” Willem said quietly to her, the soothing tone he used was jarring in comparison to his normally brusque manner of speech. Tracker smoothed out her custom suit bought in Italy, pre-war with France, and smiled easily.

“I’m not worrying.” She lied, and she knew that he could see right through it. He turned away from her, his gaze returning to the still struggling men on the ground and getting prepared to call it in favour of Ajax once again.

“I have some friends that can help. Don’t worry.” He said to her before he called the winner of the match for the final time that day. All the team members, including Aaliyah, who trudged from over in her corner to line up in front of Willem. Willem pointedly ignored Tracker’s questioning gaze, wondering just who these friends were supposed to be.

“You’ve all done well this week, all of you have made excellent progress in your fighting skills.” The team lightened up a bit at that, even Mirah’s cold expression warmed a little at the edges of her eyes, “However, training in mundane combat will only get you so far when Linked are involved. There is no use in grappling a man who can turn into smoke or punch a woman who is made of rubber.”

“We’re doing link combat training?” Walter said excitedly, a spark of cheer entering his eyes, though it was quickly snuffed out by his own realisation, “Wait, that means we can get challenged, right?”

The rest of the team, barring Aaliyah, turned to look at the Asian man, question obvious in their gazes. He coughed lightly, “Rich told me about it.” Ajax nodded, willing to take the man on his word, though her noticed that Aaliyah already knew what it all meant and had her face scrunched up in a mixture of too many emotions to count, most of them not even clearly appearing on her skin in their little coloured spots.

“You will be able to be challenged, yes. Other teams will be able to ask you for a fight, and at least once a week you have to agree to one of them and host it on the weekend slot.” Ajax opened his mouth to ask a question, but Aaliyah got to him before he could even say the first word.

“No, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore Baxter’s team. They can have their trainer petition for a match, and they’ll get it. Besides, we still have Graduation.” Aaliyah’s words came with a tone of frustration, not unusual for the girl, but only making the new information even more unsettling.

“Someone’s a quick study.” Tracker said, grinning at the girl, taking the reins from Willem’s hands for a moment. “There’s no point trying to rationalise why they have all these ridiculous measures in place. It’s all bureaucracy to the extreme.”

“Uh, what’s Graduation?” Ajax looked between Aaliyah, Tracker, and Willem hesitantly, “I’m assuming we don’t just get our certification and leave?” Willem barked coarsely with laughter.

“No, that would be too easy. Conventional graduation is much like that, just being given a final test and sent on your way, but since this team is funded to such a degree, including having a personal trainer and minder, you’re required to go through Graduation.” He enunciated the initial syllable of the word just to exemplify the difference between the two.

“It’s a gauntlet of battles against the others in the training program that are in combat training, from weakest to strongest. In the latter fights… well, things have less stringent rules to rely upon.” The team all grimaced, Walter grasping at the arm that’d been destroyed in his first ever match, a slight tingling feeling hidden deep in the flesh of it.

“We’re being pushed up further, aren’t we?” Aaliyah said, her mind as sharp as a scalpel, confusing the others in her team with the leap of logic, “There would be no point in putting us through ‘Graduation’ if Baxter’s team was going to leave before we did. They’ve been here for seven months, and if they go for the ten months instead of eight, then they’ll want us to Graduate in less than that.”

The agony on the faces of the trainees as they looked to Willem and Tracker for confirmation was almost palpable. Willem nodded, citing his earlier two-month prediction, eliciting a chorus of groans, even Mirah joining in on the exasperated symphony.

“We’re supposed to live through this Graduation with two months training. Is that from now, or was it a week ago when we started doing this training?”

“A week ago,” though Willem paused for a moment before correcting himself, “or almost two weeks, after your recoveries.” They almost managed to groan yet again before Tracker snapped her fingers commandingly.

“Be quiet!” She said harshly, breaking the usually amiable persona she held, “You don’t have time to moan and groan. Besides, surviving your Graduation isn’t going to be the problem, it’s what comes afterwards.”

“Afterwards?” Walter squeaked, a nervous frown worming its way onto his face while he clasped his hands together in a white-knuckled grip.

“When you’re no longer in here, and there isn’t anyone to protect you from what Baxter and his team might do when they too get out of here. You have what amounts to almost two months to get yourself ready for what comes after Graduation, especially with what I can already see that you’ll want to be doing once you do.”

The team, sufficiently called out on their heroic inclinations, stayed quiet as they looked around the room sourly. Aaliyah was just frustrated and angry, all around. Her future was being controlled from the shadows with no real way for her to usefully affect it. She knew that she was going down a dangerous path, even if she wasn’t as into the whole heroicism thing as Walter and Ajax were.

Mirah and her shared many opinions on the matter, having talked to her more, though Mirah’s ideals were inherently more black-and-white than reality really reflected. Aaliyah was too self-preservationist to have the grand ideals of saving people like the boys, but she could see a little bit of merit in gaining indisputable social power by just continuously doing good things with your link.

It wasn’t a strategy that was open to many, and even their team had their own bonds that kept them tied to earth, stopping them for wholeheartedly throwing their lives into the meatgrinder of heroics.

But Aaliyah was starting to come around to the idea that they could really do something, whether the change was big or small. She decided, in that moment, that she would put it down to these weeks of training. If they went well, then she’d commit herself entirely, and if it didn’t, then she’d have to fund another path, unwilling to just let herself die to idealism.

“Alright,” She said, iron conviction filling her voice and covering her skin in a strong orange colour, “let’s find out what we’re worth then, shall we?”

That same willpower, blooming in the strong orange colour across her skin, slowly began to infuse into the team around her. Everyone in Aaliyah’s presence realised that they were being influenced by the colour painted onto her skin, and they all took note of what it was doing to them, yet they couldn’t help but be brought into the powerful moment.

Ajax nodded, patting Walter on the back reassuringly as the shorter man tried to wipe the worry from his face. Mirah stayed quiet, but her green eyes sharpened to a point and Aaliyah crossed her arms as if to say, ‘What have you got for us?’.

Willem observed them, a grin slowly spreading across his face as he began to feel the enthusiasm build within him, the feeling of finally finding a team that could do it. One that was willing to go the mile, just to reach the starting line.

“Good. Very good.”