Tracker scratched at her chin pensively as she watched the two teams interact, Willem and David standing between them as they were introduced to Osmium being a trainer at the AASAU.

If she were being honest, it’d caught her off guard when she’d first met the man at a casual event that she’d made time for years ago. Meeting the man had been mind blowing, someone that had been a part of her own young adulthood, a role model for a generation of children.

She couldn’t have possibly stopped herself from asking every question that came to mind, something that the man didn’t actually seem too fussed by, though he did purposefully obfuscate some things. He was ex-law enforcement after all.

The man was exactly like he seemed on television all these years, though lacking the secret identity that he’d formed and without the uniform and very official mask to cover his face. He’d always seemed more intimidating and powerful in what had simply come to be known as Osmium’s ‘costume’ and without it he seemed almost… frail in comparison.

Though, Tracker wasn’t fooled. Not that anyone would truly be fooled. Willem, much shorter and stockier than the other man, greeted him quietly and held out a balled fist in the space between them. The two men looked at each other intensely for a moment, David Braker’s taciturn expression meeting Willem Ross’ stoically neutral.

The gentle lift in the legendary Linked’s face was all the warning that they got before David connected his knuckles with Willem’s, both reeling back a few centimetres, and then clashing their fists against one another with a sound like someone had been hit in the head with a sledgehammer.

A sound that Tracker personally wished she’d have forgotten by now.

The clash didn’t look like much, if you were deaf, but the power that went into that simple fist bump was more than enough to kill a regular human in a heartbeat. The two men were entirely unmoved, dropping their hands to their sides with no discernible sign of injury.

“Still kept some of your strength?” Willem said, loud enough that Tracker could easily hear it from here, a rare sign of Willem being excited by something. David’s eyebrow rose in his ever-perfunctory way.

“And your own continues to grow.” No question about it, the man was absolutely sure in his statement. Tracker’s ears perked up at the mention of Willem’s strength, the rare nugget of information about the secretive man. Tracker knew more than most about Willem, but not many knew Willem before he became a trainer at the AASAU, making David a rare resource.

Willem waved a hand, as if the statement from his old friend was a given. Tracker tried to gain some contextual information from the two men, but as stoic as they both were, it was virtually impossible.

After that, the men began to talk to their teams about how training was going to work, and what training entailed. It was pretty standard stuff, at least for now. The more regular training usually involved combat games that would test teamwork and other important skill sets.

However, Willem wasn’t training them for those situations. They were unimportant in comparison to the training’s actual purpose. It’d been stated to the team the importance for preparing themselves to match what the outside world had to offer, and while it might’ve been nice and impactful for the moment, they’ve clearly reverted ever so slightly into thinking more narrowly.

They were worried about Baxter, about his father, about what could happen to them in the near future. There was probably a portion of that that worry that considered what would happen to them on the outside, what Ernest Baxter might pull out of the bag to launch his son’s notoriety into the sky, but they weren’t worrying enough.

Tracker and Willem weren’t foolish, they’d seen the way that the team was going. It wasn’t super often, but Tracker and Willem had both seen trainees go through the mandated training and come out the other side, hoping to make a difference in the world with their links.

It never worked. It always ended in being broken by the world around you, an unrelenting machine of people sticking so fastidiously to the status quo of the world. When another ‘hero’ appears, people don’t look to them with the hope that the hero expects, they watch as the people they want to help place bets on their inevitable demise, or their eventual disappearance.

The beginning for a hero, however, is still the easiest part. People can power through the ridicule and the scorn, even the hate, but what can’t be powered through is the reality of the death that was required to be wrought.

The naïve hero doesn’t expect to meet a foe that won’t submit. They underestimate the live or die mentality that surrounds Linked everywhere they go, and when they try to insert themselves into the situation with a moral compass that tells them that they need to help these Linked, to try and reform them, they die.

You can’t talk down a lion or a tiger from a murderous rage. You can’t spout platitudes at the Linked druglord and expect anything more than getting shot. To do any of those two things, with any confidence, you needed power beyond anything that the little team of Undefined Linked had.

They had promise, yes. Ajax with a link that had the potential to be one of the vaunted ‘scaling’ links, capable of rising to meet the occasion. Walter with his ability to potentially generate and control the four mythological elements to his will, if his will was enough. Aaliyah with her potential as an immensely powerful physical tank, along with the strange effects that her other emotions have, like her determination from only so long ago.

Then Mirah, with whatever the hell her link was supposed to be.

The potential, while not astoundingly obvious, was there. However, it was all predicated upon the individuals to learn to use their links in such a way that they almost couldn’t be considered Undefined any longer. They needed power, and they needed it all the time.

Tracker watched Willem sort out the teams into pairs. Ajax was with Ren, both of the men that’d become the de facto leaders of their respective teams. Aaliyah was placed against Jamie, the girl in the long sleeved and high collared pullover, an interesting matchup. Walter was with Julia, the elemental controller against the purple blob of indeterminant power. And finally, Mirah was placed against the extremely tall Zimbabwean girl, June.

Tracker had done research on the other team in preparation for the day, ready to build a report and grill each team member on their performance, and what they should or should not have done. It was something that would have been easier if there were such thing as a ‘standard’ matchup, but where links were involved, standardisation failed to meet expectations.

The pairs were split into quarters of the field, with Willem interacting with his AASAU provided smartphone to control the field’s basic functions. It was with an unceremonious beginning that the pairs began to spar with one another, with winners of individual spars appearing almost instantaneously.

Mirah, as expected, lost immediately, having been tripped only moments after she’d confirmed the beginning of the spar with her partner. Her partner was somewhat notorious for her matches in the past, almost always winning, and always within moments of the match starting.

June Nkala was amazingly fast, one of the fastest Linked that Tracker had ever personally witnessed. Her body was changed entirely since she’d Awakened to her link, remodelling it from a somewhat standard five foot tall in her young teens into a seven-foot tall being, optimised for speed both physically and supernaturally.

The moment of extreme speed was almost entirely unperceivable to Tracker, even as she threw all her mental power towards seeing it in real time. June’s seven foot frame warped and contorted into a pose entirely impossible for a human to reproduce, using the massive flexibility she’d gained from her physical changes with astonishing precision.

The young woman had lost almost all physical strength as her link had morphed her body, instead being replaced with freakish flexibility and astounding agility, not to mention the enhancement to her nerves and their tiny response time.

Mirah had no chance, even if she’d properly prepared herself to read the other woman’s upcoming movements, or if that was even how her own link truly functioned at all. Mirah was on the ground, staring at the mess of metal beams and concrete that made up Arena B-3’s ceiling, June crouching above her with a hand outstretched.

Tracker didn’t have time to ruminate on the fight further before the second victory was about to be decided. Aaliyah had met her direct match, someone capable of standing toe to toe with her power other than Ajax on a good day, and Willem of course. The two girls went at the fight with an extreme intensity, though the whirlwind of battle didn’t reveal all too much for the outside onlooker.

It was only with an eagle eye that Tracker was able to spot the claws that Aaliyah was fending off with her rage powered strength and durability, Jamie’s unending onslaught of attacks leaving her almost entirely unable to do anything but dodge and block.

Tracker knew the reason for Jamie’s oversized pullover, both for her own social shyness and the tactical benefit to it. It hid the fact that Jamie’s arms were almost twenty percent longer than average, even longer when she had her claws fully extended.

Something that Jamie, despite her distaste for her form, used excellently. With a short jump into the air, the girl stretched out her arms to full length, slashing at Aaliyah from both of sides. With no choice but to block, Aaliyah quickly found herself locked in a death grip by the other girl’s scaled grip. With an action almost like a slingshot, Jamie launched her and Aaliyah’s body forwards, pushing her away in a trip, then planting two feet into her gut, smashing her into the ground with ease.

A brutal finish, one that could have easily disembowelled if Jamie had extended the claws on her feet as well.

Ajax’s own defeat was next, unable to summon the power he needed to defeat the other man in hand to hand, he was only put at an even further disadvantage when Ren started to actually use his link.

Ren was not a man that you underestimated, not that Ajax would dare do anything like that. The Japanese man was an exceptional example of how strange links could easily be just as strong, if not stronger, than a more conventional link. The man’s link? Plant based hair.

It was strange, but you could see Ren’s hair grow out from his scalp at a speed that Tracker couldn’t help but think would hurt like hell. The green, thinly bladed hair formed around his body quickly, tightly weaving itself around his body in layer after layer, leaving him looking like he was wearing a textured, green body suit.

But the effect was undeniable.

With Ren being extremely proficient in martial arts of almost every kind, it was a pure display of enhanced human movement and technique. Ajax might be strong, and far stronger than Ren was when he had something to protect, but Ren had control.

The fight ended with Ajax on the floor, pinned underneath an effortlessly positioned Ren. The man not even having to show an inkling of his true moveset.

The admirable final contender was Walter. No-one was truly all that surprised, with Walter somehow becoming the most powerful Linked in his team. The somewhat hesitant beams of fire extending from his hands were his first mistakes, with Julia’s form being effectively impervious to fire until extremely high heats, one of the reasons that he’d been placed against her.

Julia was a woman of many mysteries when it came to her link.

An amorphous blob of something, possessing strange qualities beyond most of what even Linked science can really understand. However, the actual ‘use’ of her link came more in the manipulation of sound.

She was so extremely close to being labelled an Undefined, but her link was simply too useful of an idea to pass up. And as Tracker observed from the sidelines, she watched as Walter got a firsthand experience with just how important sound was to your perception.

Tracker could see Julia’s jelly-like body shudder and shiver as it produced strange sounds, unhearable to anyone but Walter. If Tracker was to hazard a guess, she’d bet that Julia was feeding an exact recreation of Walter’s special sound, back to him half a second later.

It wasn’t something that would be considered extremely useful in any normal situation, but in a battle scenario with an opponent who wasn’t expecting it, it was intensely valuable. Tracker could see Walter go through the checklist in his mind, trying to understand what was wrong with his perception. Was it his sight? Was it just the sound?

The delay was a killer.

Walter wasn’t able to react fast enough to Julia’s form as it sprang towards him. Julia’s purple body had constricted itself and then let the pressure within bounce her forth with explosive propulsion, hitting Walter directly in the chest with her mass.

It only took a moment for Julia to form her body over Walter’s binding him in place with his arms forced straight upwards and unable to burn her with the origin point of his flames being pointed away from her.

And that’s all it took for Tracker’s little team of Undefined to collapse like a house of cards. She looked at their faces as they realised just how much Baxter’s team had been forced to hold back due to their being judges present.

“What are you all waiting for?” She called, hands up to her mouth as she jeered, “Get back up and go again!”