The two girls stood opposite each other, both of them sweating profusely in their spots within the sectioned off area they’d been given to compete. They had been at it for hours, unrelenting in their fierce and quiet competition. Those that had remained after Aaliyah and Jamie’s fight, Walter, Ren, and Ajax had all stopped training hours ago, instead turning to watch the two women fight.

Their bouts lasted only a few seconds each time, always starting with June rushing towards Mirah at a speed Mirah couldn’t possibly react to by sheer biological limitations. By the time June had started moving, Mirah had already begun her own preparations for what was to come. The onlookers to the battles were continually baffled by what was going on, the movements almost incomprehensible in the moment.

Walter, probably the most tactically minded of the group in battle, always spent the moments after the conclusion of the fight to outline what had just happened to the rest of the onlookers. It took hours for the first of them to leave, and since the arenas were technically closing for the night, Willem tactfully left the lights on and the door open for them to continue with their fights unimpeded.

The two girls were focused, and while they had realised that they’d been left behind for the night, they had paid little attention to it. They were focused solely on their fighting and waging a war between minor successes and failures. It always came down to the wire, between three, four, and five evasions of June’s attacks. Only once had Mirah managed a sixth, an event that had gone wholly unnoticed by any other than the combatants themselves and the trainers that constantly oversaw their training.

It was all a game of pure skill, on both of the girl’s parts. And with that had come the quiet rise of June’s capabilities since they had begun training. She had originally thought that there would be no challenge in the fights, like many of her fights beforehand had been. They were useless for her progression, and her only competition were machines and numbers that quantified her.

But now, in the oddest of places and in the oddest of ways, she’d found herself a true rival.

June flashed forwards with a speed she couldn’t have achieved only a week before, but now her every start was faster and smoother than the last, though that had never worked against the other girl. The first movement was always a write off for June, where Mirah had the advantage of knowing it far in advance of even June herself.

The next few blows were always a balancing act between doing enough to where Mirah was suitably thrown around and maintaining speed and momentum to continue the frenzied assault on the woman. This was where June had gained the most benefit, in the fine control of that tightrope walk.

June had quietly become the most powerful in her group, which had been a contest between herself and Ren mostly. Ren, while becoming stronger to a degree, hadn’t evolved in such a drastic way as June had. The really astounding part for June, however, was not her own progression. It was Mirah’s progression that had stunned her most.

Mirah wasn’t physically strong, nor was she even particularly athletic aside from the basis that came with being a Linked in the first place. The reality is that she wasn’t likely to ever be much more than a very fit human, maybe reaching further beyond that with inordinate amounts of training. So, it only really served to make it more impressive when she was capable of keeping up with June’s movements to such a degree.

As June had gotten better, so had Mirah, even managing to outstrip her in this particular contest of skill. Mirah clear precognitive abilities were comprehensive and weren’t thrown off even when June intentionally changed her methods in the middle of a bout to add to the erratic mess that would usually knock a precognitive flat.

Precognitive were a weird subset of link expression. Both extremely rare and widely misunderstood. The definition for precognition had changed substantially over the years, especially when much of that small population was made up of people who were effectively hypercognitives that were capable of merely doing massive calculations in their head.

True precognitive links were just strange, and rarely of any use. Some only allowed for a split second to be seen in advance, some allowed for strange and eclectic paintings of the far future that made little to no sense. Even the most powerful precogs came with some strangeness to them, either restricted in what they can say because oof the impact it might have, or so powerful that it dominates their being entirely.

Mirah, however, was different. June had known another precognitive, just by pure chance, when she still lived in Zimbabwe. They had been limited by the effort it took them to prepare for ‘seeing’, and then even after that their divination had been filled with unspecific vagaries. Mirah wasn’t like that. Mirah’s link was sharp and precise, clearly.

They hadn’t really spoken on what made their respective links tick, and June’s was pretty boring unless you were to look into the science of it. Mirah’s link, however, was filled with the interest that you expected from the nebulous links the AASAU loved to label as Undefined. It was baffling to June, as far she was concerned, any link is a link that can be utilised with practice. That the AASAU were so willing to give up on the potential that Undefined Linked represented was almost criminal, but she didn’t make the rules.

Despite performing bout after bout, the two girls never seemed to truly waver with exhaustion, a benefit of being Linked. The ability to simply continue to push against the boundaries of their physical and mental capability with almost no consequences, so they delved deeper and deeper into the night with a stable fervour.

They had reached a point of absolute flow hours ago, a state where they simply sat and floated within practice against each other, enjoying the mix of comfort and strain on their minds and bodies as the challenged themselves relentlessly. They were both subsumed by the flow of it, taken with the glorious feeling of constant improvement beyond anything they were capable of alone.

Even Mirah, who was a hard woman to sway with immediate gratification, was finding herself enamoured with the training. It was as if she were drinking from an overflowing font of creativity and ingenuity, fuelling her mind to approach and understand the web of golden lines that made up the immediate futures.

She’d become good at understanding the likelihood of any given future happening, but she was still bound by the limitation that she’d only truly know the outcome as it happened. However, that wasn’t necessarily the entire story, and Mirah had begun to see a great success within her ability to more accurately delineate between possible forks in the webbed future.

It wasn’t so much an actual calculation, or really a clear signal either, but was all based in comprehension instead. When she looked at a web of events now, her eyes simply followed the most likely path, and the rest of those paths were immediately whittled down to those that were capable of realistically happening, instead of showing literally every option.

As Mirah’s mind had progressed further, she’d become capable of condensation of events. There were so many events that were all but guaranteed to happen sequentially, and when Mirah started to relate those actions strongly enough for them to almost combine on the web, she realised why she’d had so much difficulty early on.

The voices were confusing, not only because of their cacophony of voices, all rallying for different things, but because each voice was a slight variation on another. Actually having each variation of how a person could walk in the next few seconds really wasn’t useful information, and when she had found her new aspect of her link, Mirah had become capable of condensing it into a visual ‘map’.

The webbed map of lines that had once been a sprawling disk of infinite actions, which had also once been an overwhelming cacophony of voices, was now a collection of lines branching from a main tree. Each branch represented a diversion from what was ‘most likely’ and if such a branch were to be followed, then that branch would then become the beginning of a new tree of possibility.

Once she’d realised that the scenery of the web, while technically infinitely complex, was simply a tiny difference between ten other actions that already existed, the homogenisation of that scenery actualised Mirah’s ability to accurately understand the future on a macro scale. But, even still, there was one problem.

Mirah wasn’t capable of winning. It wasn’t physically possible. The theoretical limit, barring non-physical means, was seven evasions. The only reason that Mirah knew that was because of the one time that she’d managed a sixth evasion. June hadn’t quite caught on to that fact just yet, mostly because Mirah knew she was capable of staying at the same level due to June’s inherent limitations.

You can only move so fast, and accelerate so fast, so in the specific situation of these bouts, June was capped at a certain level of effectiveness. But Mirah would always lose at the fifth evasion, unless an extraordinarily unlikely set of events coincided with one another. It would take June hesitating for just a moment on the fourth evasion, unlikely for someone so relentless as June, then choosing to go for a low sweep on the sixth…

Then the only option that Mirah would have is a tackle. It would have to be right as the other woman retreated with a gymnast’s back handspring, but if Mirah could pull that off, then she’d almost surely be sent behind June. June would then try to attack her while off kilter from the first true contact she’d received from Mirah, which Mirah would be able to easily evade.

That would be what the seventh evasion would look like. The only problem being that its probability laid somewhere in the thousands to tens of thousands of attempts to get this extraordinarily specific set of circumstances to line up like the stars. Mirah had relied on nothing but her webbed map, which had now become more of a tree, and what she was physically capable of. There was no trickery, no outside tools or help, nothing.

Yet there was something she’d left on the table this whole time, intentionally of course.

Her ‘telekinesis’. The half of her abilities that she’d left untouched since she’d gained the capability to see the golden lines. It was something that had been screaming to be used for days as she trained, but she’d ignored it in favour of seeing just how far she could push her understanding of the web, then the tree she held within her mind.

“It’s late.” Mirah said, her voice almost sounding massive in the cold air of the arena they were in. June looked slightly taken aback by the sudden noise, her mind having long since disregarded speech as an option between bouts. The massively tall woman looked down towards Mirah’s emerald eyes and finding herself with an expression of consternation.

The golden lines in her eyes had changed since she’d last taken notice of them, less a weak sprawl of gold, like they were shattered with golden light shining through the gaps. Now, they were filled almost entirely with a powerful looking tree, its branches reaching to the edges of her eyes and past her irises and over the whites of her eyes.

They were unnerving to look at. Not because they were clearly an affectation of Mirah’s Link, which could technically be classified as a minor morph, but because even looking at the golden lines made little invasive thoughts appear in her mind. They were thoughts that were almost like dreams, where the moment they were gone, she couldn’t remember them, but she was certain that those thoughts existed moments in the future. Her future.

“It is.” June said slowly after a long silence, forcing her face back to neutrality. Mirah looked the dark skinned and incredibly tall woman up and down, before returning to her deep eyes.

“One last bout. All stops pulled.”

Mirah’s words resounded like a clear bell within the large, empty space, almost as a mirror to how they resounded within June’s mind. They had competed all day, and the days before that as well, but this felt final, important. This was more than just one more bout, this was the ultimate battle between them, the culmination of both of their rises in power.

No words were said before June moved, both of them standing exactly where they would have started any other bout. June could feel her legs burn as she pushed them far beyond what she’d ever needed to before, directly defying air resistance with her body’s strange speed.

June swung her body close to the ground, trying to go for Mirah’s thighs, but Mirah could see it coming a mile away at this point, having already stepped back just enough to be outside of June’s range. The second movement was a similar, reckless advance towards Mirah, releasing her grip on the floor with her feet and flinging herself forwards.

Mirah could only see June as a black blur of noise in her vision, but if Mirah were relying on her vision to combat against the speed Linked, then she wouldn’t be capable of a single evasion. Before the grab was even attempted, Mirah crouched quickly, then launching herself to the side in a quick dive before the other girl had managed the grab.

The immense speed at which this all happened made it almost incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t have some sort of perception related link, and even for Mirah, it often felt as if she were taking action far in advance. However, her link was quick to inform her that if she’d waited even a fraction of a second longer, she would easily be caught in June’s grip.

June, predictably, missed the grab, but was quick to recoup her stance and make a mad dash for the girl who was only just touching down from her dive. Yet, it was in that short run that something strange happened, something that baffled her so profoundly that after she had tried to kick Mirah’s limbs out from under her, which had been combated with a quick roll into a standing position, she could only stand and stare at the green-eyed woman.

June’s foot had almost slipped on the mat. Something totally normal to anyone but June, who’s entire body was formed in such a way that it was almost an impossibility to slip without intentionally doing so, especially after so much fine control training in the past week.

The moment of stillness only lasted a long time in the mind of a speed Linked, where time may as well be slowed to a halt. However, June rushed forwards with a little bit more gusto than was regular in order to make up for the time she’d lost in her confusion. June went for a push, which Mirah stepped aside of, setting up a perfect opportunity for June.

June’s leg whipped out, forcing her to drop some of her height to add to her reach and, in that moment, June was elated. This attack was too fast for Mirah to possibly react to, with her body capable at moving far beyond what Mirah’s perception would be able to ascertain. So, when June realised that Mirah had managed to dodge the attack but was also using the loss that June had taken in her height to perform it against her, she was beyond stunned.

Mirah crashed down on June’s body, and the surprisingly light girl beneath her crumbled under Mirah’s weight pressing on the weakest her stance could be for a moment like this. June fell flat onto the floor, and she gave a desperate launch with her legs to kick Mirah off of her. Mirah gladly took the extra propulsion, though she could feel the sickening crunch as June’s surprisingly powerful blow made her ribs crunch in her chest.

Mirah did a short flip, the greatest act of acrobatics that she’d ever managed, sticking the landing and turning towards the sight of the other girl already at her feet and moving in a blur of intense speed right for her, determined to not let her have the seventh evasion Mirah was clearly going for.

And, with one subtle pull of a golden line, June decided to go with a punch, which Mirah simply sidestepped with a preparedness that demolished June’s mind.

“I give.” Mirah huffed before June could take any of the eight actions that would all end in Mirah at least ending up unconscious. The two women, frozen in time, stood only a metre away from each other, both breathing more heavily than they had in any of the bouts of similar intensity before this final one.

Mirah had done it, and they both knew that it was a wild, astounding victory. As far as either of them were concerned, this was as perfect as Mirah could have possibly performed, even if Mirah had sacrificed her ribs to do so and would have ultimately failed if June had simply continued on.

June didn’t need to ask what she’d done to pull it off. All she needed to do was look at the evidence laid before her and take an easy guess. The stars had aligned for Mirah in a way that surpassed logic, and it had created the best result, or close to. This entire time June had thought the girl was just a precog, but this was far beyond that.

She could see in her training partner’s eyes that they were both coming to the same epiphany, the same terrifying conclusion.

Mirah couldn’t just see the future. She could change it.

June swallowed heavily before quickly turning and pacing towards the door at three times the regular stride. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

No other words were needed, not for a realisation like that.