Watching the man move had been terrifying.

Aaliyah was someone hardened to grand displays of power, with having dealt with particularly unstable Linked while she’d acted as the Monarch. Her own Linked, those aligned to her father’s little empire, had once tried to intimidate their way into holding power over her. What it had granted them was a fear for their family’s safety, especially after she’d sent physical mail to their children and partners.

A low blow to be sure, but she wasn’t ever intending on actually doing anything to them. Well, except for getting those Linked themselves killed, but that was within scope for her.

Ajax had always been a man of indeterminant power. The displays of strength he’d managed were few and far between, and the feats of his consistent strength, while surely impressive, weren’t overly so. He could lift large weights, but not truly large weights. He could take a solid hit, but not something that was engineered to kill.

Aaliyah was tougher, and slowly becoming competitive in raw strength, especially after she’d learned to counterbalance her rage with the trust that she held within herself. Now that the trust she possessed slowly grew, with those around her and even herself, the rage and anger that fuelled her strength could increase to match.

But she hadn’t expected to watch Ajax rise to new heights so suddenly.

To her knowledge he’d done no training of particular note or had any real impressive breakthrough in training with Willem, or in combat with Ren. But everyone had been watching that first bout between Ajax and Ren, the two men always being the quickest into training, and their fights always being an enjoyable spectacle.

It was different right from the start. Aaliyah wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did. She could almost feel that power on the man’s bronzed skin while Ren’s hair wrapped his right arm in tight restraint. It was in how Ajax reacted to the events, almost as if he wasn’t at all concerned as he had been before. He was no longer trying to swipe at the hair with his axe, cleaving them from the other man’s use.

Instead, he simply pulled himself free.

The next few moments had been truly astounding. The way Ajax moved, the simple movements being so unavoidable and unswerving. He was a titan, a goliath, a statue of the densest stone come to life. In the heat of the interaction, Aaliyah had let her eyes glance over to the collection of their three overseers. All of them stood as they always did; neutral observers to the fight before them—yet she was perceptive enough to see the collective glint in their eyes.

They had expected something like this. Aaliyah wasn’t sure how they had known, but the look on the former Osmium’s face was impressive, even showing through the thick layer of stoicism that the man was famous for. Osmium’s eyes were burning with a very particular type of excitement, something that Aaliyah hadn’t ever seen in someone before, and certainly not experienced herself.

When she turned her eyes back to Ajax, she saw the final movement he took, grabbing the significantly morphed hair of his opponent and easily lifting him up to where his eyes could meet with the defeated opponent’s.

Aaliyah heard the words that Ajax said but they didn’t quite compute till his head shifted to look right at her.

“Aaliyah,” Ajax’s voice boomed like the beating of a drum, “it’s your turn now.”

Her eyes locked with his, she found herself in the presence of a totally different type of being, one that she had only seen sparing moments of in others. She’d dealt with the chaotic her whole life, and even learned to take ultimate advantage of it. A chaotic person could be manipulated easily, a chaotic world always had something that people were forgetting, but Ajax wasn’t filled with chaos.

No, he was orderly. All straight lines and clear eyes. The man’s link, for as nebulous as it was, lacked the real complexity that the other’s in the group had to grapple with. And now that he’d come to understand, he had come one step closer to order, protection, and defence itself. In a horrifying moment of realisation, as Ajax stood with his opponent held in possibly the most overbearing positions, Aaliyah realised what was so interesting about Ajax to Willem and Osmium.

He was like them.

The rapture came with a wide eyed glance, snapping towards the trainers that were now looking towards her under Ajax’s sudden proclamation. Osmium, his eyes slowly leeching their fiery excitement, pushed his glasses up his nose gently and stared at her while Willem stood beside him with an amused look on his face. As if he knew that Aaliyah was coming to the conclusion now.

It was why she could never have properly controlled the team, like she had the other groups she’d inserted herself into. She was adept at chaos, and she’d thought, ‘What was more chaotic than a group of untrained Linked?’

But they weren’t chaotic. Walter was idealistic, yes, but he had a clear vision. Mirah, while the biggest candidate for pure chaos, was more than a little definite in the way she thought, even black and white in some instances. And Ajax?

Ajax was almost the worst of them all. He was the protector, and now that she looked into his coal black eyes, his every movement and glance filled with surety and power, she knew that he was right.

She let her eyes drop from the powerful man’s gaze, taking a deep breath and preparing herself for what would come. The world around her disappearing as she let her mind meld with the darkness that lurked within, letting it feed her mind in a way that she hadn’t allowed since she’d been the Monarch.

She couldn’t be like the rest of her team, that was a fool’s errand. She was too imbued with that chaos to possibly achieve that. Really, Aaliyah believed herself to just be a single part order within a whirling storm of chaos surrounding it, interjecting just enough to keep it from tearing itself apart.

Until now, she’d been focusing on control, on technique, on power. But that was never her immediate strength. Her strength wasn’t in any of those things; it was in versatility, adaptability, unpredictability. Ajax had found his own spot, shaping himself in a way that granted him a great deal of power. Walter seemed to only be scratching the surface in just how far he could go. Mirah’s link simply surpassed Aaliyah’s immediate understanding at all.

So where was she supposed to fit in that? With her power, and her disposition?

She looked up from the spot on the floor she’d zoned out while staring at, finding the eyes of her partner, the physically adept morph Linked. They shared a muted look, her partner trying to make sense of the current situation and Aaliyah mustering her resolve in a final, quiet moment.

“Looks like it’s time, Jamie.” Aaliyah’s said, smiling ruefully. But even Jamie saw that the smile came to Aaliyah’s face a little too easily, quickly moving to hide something else below it. “Prepare yourself.” Aaliyah intoned deeply, jarring against the usually neutral or light tones of her voice, betraying the easy smile on her face.

Jamie got into her starting position, something more akin to a running pose than a fighter’s stance. Aaliyah, however, did much the same as her teammate had done only a minute ago. She stood completely open, discarding the use of the fighting stances that she’d been using against the other woman.

Aaliyah widened her arms, showing off the proportional length of them and the pale skin that was only partially covered by a training shirt. With a single step forward, the fight had begun. Jamie almost hesitated, wondering if the step forward that the woman had taken meant that it had begun. However, Jamie was unwilling to give in to the other girl’s mind games, hesitation only having been punished severely in past bouts with Aaliyah.

Jamie rushed forwards, using both legs and arms to propel herself with a shocking speed that only actual movement links could rival. On the self-repairing arena floor, four gouges were left where Jamie’s claws had raked through the material, their sharpness trumping the linktech material.

However, Aaliyah stood before the girl’s path, a sudden shock of red splattering across her skin with the powerful blue that usually accompanied it. Jamie thought that she would make it before the tall blonde would be able to react, but there was a moment of stunning confusion when Jamie blinked…

And Aaliyah was no longer there.

Jamie’s senses lit on fire as she tried to understand what’d just happened, her brain using that fraction of a second to compute as much useless information as it could, before she felt a distinct pull against the high collar of her jumper. Jamie’s wide eyes snapped down to see Aaliyah’s face, body in limbo position as Jamie moved over her in slow motion.

Aaliyah grinned, grabbing the other girl by her collar and, with a horrible impact, Jamie could feel the linktech concrete meet against the scale that covered her body almost completely. All the force of her jump was redirected into the ground, having her skid across the surface on her belly. The sound of her keratin-like scales on the rough stone made Jamie immediately panic.

Ignoring the pain, Jamie clambered to her feet, looking down at the thoroughly ripped jumper. It was falling apart from the massive section that’d been destroyed from Aaliyah’s throw. Beneath, Jamie wore a t-shirt that didn’t do a good job of hiding the graduating brown scales that totally covered the vast majority of her body underneath her baggy clothing.

Jamie’s first instinct was to return to the fight and think about her quickly mounting anxiety later. But as she looked up, converting her anxiety into rage toward the other woman, she found Aaliyah covered in large swathes of colour; red and blue mainly, but there was another colour present.

It was blue as well, but a different kind from the larger potions. This blue was light, but not a pleasant baby blue. Somehow this colour almost seemed… shaky and destabilising. Aaliyah moved a few steps forward and, with a sudden intensity, Jamie’s anxiety went from manageable to borderline manic.

The world around her sucked in, as if she’d suddenly been put on a stage, a massive, hot light blaring into her face and highlighting her every minute detail. Jamie could feel her breathing speed up, only trapping her more and more in the cycle of thought as her mind latched onto the eyes that she was sure was watching her.

Then the actual punch in the gut came. The one that was not at all created by the vision of a dark audience to her disfigured body, but a genuine fist that placed itself solidly in her gut at full force. With a whirling sense of inertia, she was ripped from the vision, Jamie suddenly realised that she was flying through the air. Breaking the moment of illusion and forcing her to shift desperately in mid-air, the force of the blow continued to last as she scratched into the floor with her sharp claws.

It took a moment for her to stabilise against the push, then feel the horrible reactionary clench in her gut as she realised that her jumper had managed to fall off of her scaled form completely. Now her extended arms were exposed in their entire length, including the long claws that were embedded a few centimetres into the floor.

She looked up, desperately trying to get a hold of where Aaliyah was once again, but all she could see was a knee, covered in that angry, burning red. Just above where the collar had once covered the bottom of Jamie’s scaled face, Aaliyah’s knee contacted with a crack of explosive force, sending Jamie’s head back so fast that it made her vision go totally white.

With another flurry of disorienting movement, Aaliyah’s legs wrapped around the other girl’s scaled neck and used the rest of the force to throw her to the ground.

Aaliyah held her legs in that hasty takedown, wrapped around Jamie’s neck for a few more moments, then quickly pulling away and taking a few steps back. Breathing heavily and trying to compose herself, she pulled herself from the whirl of ideas that she’d delved into to defeat the other girl so completely.

She looked down at Jamie, who seemed to have passed out; if not when the knee had interacted with her face, then definitely when she’d been thrown to the ground. Aaliyah forced down the emotions that shifted across her skin, the ones that she’d released to power her during her fight.

The hardest to push down was the one she was most unfamiliar with handling, anxiousness. The light blue wanted desperately to take over the rest of her skin, pushing away the trust and enflaming the already engorged rage. Ripping herself from the emotions that were necessary for her to fight was an astoundingly difficult task, requiring a moment of almost meditative silence.

The emotions leaked from her skin like molten metal, dripping deep into the depths of her, far from the showcase of colours they had been moments before. She found herself sweating profusely, realising how close she’d let herself become to the line, one that threatened to allow those emotions to run rampant.

Aaliyah realised that she’d always struggle against that line, power versus control.

She’d just have to get really, really good at walking it.