The rest of the afternoon was spent in quiet contemplation, allowing Val to come to terms with the expectations the Council had of her. A night of rest in the safety of her new quarters did wonders for mood. The shock and mild despair of the previous day had transformed into a subdued but steely sense of determination that burned in Val’s chest. It was not the first time unrealistic expectations had been placed on Val, and almost certainly would not be the last time either.

Despite the accelerated pace requested of her, it was not totally absurd; after all, a handful of top tier Users in every class did claim their D rank within the first year. Usually elites that had spent their entire childhood training and had been paired with Daemons compatible with their family’s proprietary subroutines, but a few prodiges and the extremely dedicated filled out the top spots as well.

Val was under no illusion that she was naturally gifted, but she was no stranger to hard work. The Council may have set a high bar for her, but it was clear they thought it was achievable — otherwise they would have just separated her from Noir and forced her retirement. Val took a small measure of comfort and pride in that unspoken trust. Now she just had to find a way to turn it into a reality.

Before throwing herself into training, Val spent the entire next morning strategizing. For good and bad, she and Noir shared an affinity for nano disruption subroutines. The common ground made it easy for Val to quickly gain a basic proficiency with Noir’s techniques, which had allowed her to escape and survive the abduction in the first place.

Nano disruption was also situationally very powerful. Few beasts and even fewer Users had an active defense for such techniques. Once their nanosystems were disrupted, they were no stronger than normal. Val didn’t have Bri’s strength, Zavis’s armor or weapons, Wallon’s explosions, or Kaya’s ridiculous rifle rounds, but she didn’t need any of that if she could just nullify any of her enemies’ powers. This was why Noir’s Users had traditionally been tasked with subduing rogue Users in the past.

However, Val’s spar with Bri had highlighted her biggest current weakness: until she landed her techniques, Val was woefully outclassed. It was a disadvantage she could overcome with either surprise and meticulous planning, but in a straight up fight, she just wasn’t fast enough or strong enough. With that shortcoming in mind, Val threw herself into intense physical training.

The next week passed quickly as the Defects helped Val train. She spent the majority of each morning in the basement arena, either doing drills or sparring with Bri or Zavis. Bri’s overwhelming speed and strength forced Val to use an evasive, agility-focused style. For his part, Zavis seemed content to turtle behind his shield, requiring Val to work on her position and find the right openings.

The afternoons were spent primarily in the armory. The safehouse exosuit had served Val well, but now that she had access to more modern sets of armor. She spent many hours tinkering with a new exosuit, optimizing the middle control layer to fit her traces perfectly and extract every ounce of efficiency that she could. Not having found a set style yet, Val kept her loadout flexible with mounting points for a variety of small blades, pistols, a rifle, and utility consumables like grenades and flares.

One option she did keep from the old exosuit was Noir’s pair of batons that slipped into the vambraces of her armor, giving her forearms an extra layer of protection when retracted and allowing for rapid hands-free deployment. The few hits she landed on Bri came from unorthodox strikes using those weapons, although the combat-savvy warrior quickly learned to anticipate them. Zavis still maintained an impenetrable defense, even against the tricky weapons.

Although the Defects were taking a much more active role in Val’s training and protection than before, they still found time to take on assignments. Coordinating around Val’s schedule, two or three members of the squad would leave via their new personal tube system to dispatch beasts near Peakpoint. At least one Defect was always left behind to ensure Val’s safety, although she was surprised to see each of them roughly equally.

She had assumed that Zavis would go out on almost all the missions, but he seemed plenty content to let the others go out without him. After hearing the sorts of missions they completed, Val quickly learned to trust their competency. Regardless of which subset of Defects went out, beasts died in an unimaginably short time. The initial shock wore off after the first dozen or so missions, saving Val’s jaw from dropping open each time; instead, she resorted to exchanging incredulous glances and shrugs with Bell, who continued to man the front desk.

Although it was an open but unspoken secret that the young man was there primarily to keep an eye on the Defects for the Council, he had smoothly stepped into an administrative role that no one on the squad seemed to want to take. Although Bell worked closely with the building’s dedicated Daemon and public-facing Daemons for each of the Guilds and the Council, he was not a User himself. Given Val’s new User status, she and Bell found themselves striking up a loose friendship. One born out of a shared workplace, convenience, and as a support group for maintaining their sense of normalcy in the face of the Defect’s ridiculous continued accomplishments, but a friendship nonetheless.

Settling into a training routine, the mentorship from Bri and Zavis, and interactions with Bell did wonders to soothe Val’s frayed nerves. It gave her the time and space she needed to sort through all the major life events of the past month. While she was still stressed about the looming threat of the Unshackled and the expectations of the Defects and Council, Val felt like she was clawing back some sense of control over her life. Unfortunately, Val’s increased stability had one unfortunate side effect in that it shined a bright light on the glaring hole that remained in her new life: her friendship with Fynn.

While she was cautiously optimistic about repairing her relationship with Zyra and chatting with Bell was a pleasant distraction, she really missed the easy and complete trust she had with Fynn. Taking her safety seriously, Zavis was reluctant to increase the number of people who knew Val was alive. Surprisingly, it had been Kaya who had pulled Zavis aside and changed his mind with a few curt words and an intense stare.

“So long as you meet Fynn in a controlled environment and have at least one of us with you, I’ll allow it,” said Zavis as he rejoined Val after talking with Kaya.

Brow furrowed in confusion, Val nonetheless inclined her head towards Kaya in gratitude. The sniper gave Val a slight nod in return before she stepped out of the room. Turning back to Zavis, Val quickly agreed with his conditions.

“Both seem like good precautions,” she replied. After another moment of thinking, a slow grin spread across her face. “I think I have something that’ll work nicely. Let me just send a few messages.”

The following morning, Val stood in a standard exosuit in a different fighting pit than the one in the Defect’s basement arena. With a knife strapped to her thigh and a pistol holstered on her hip, her loadout was much more reminiscent of her pre-User kit than the current one she was developing with Noir. To one side of the room, Bri leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. Bri’s body position looked relaxed to a casual observer, but there was a subtle tension that indicated she was ready to spring into action at the first sign of danger.

Voices in the hallway.

Smoothly taking Noir’s sudden announcement in stride, Val strained her ears and realized that she could indeed hear the low murmuring of two voices slowly growing louder. Thanks, Noir. In addition to her physical training, the past week had also done wonders for her relationship with the Daemon. Their sync had gone up from 23% up to 27%, a small but appreciable increase that represented the strength of Val’s neural link.

However, the true gains came just from trying to work together to adapt Noir’s subroutines and design a new exosuit for Val. For her part, Val had always enjoyed tinkering with nano subroutines. It was how she had ended up focusing on nano disruption in the first place, and her first Guild rotation with the Technicians gave her enough of a foundation to start understanding how Noir’s subroutines were constructed. Meanwhile, the lack of deadly combat was clearly good for Noir, allowing them to rekindle some of their academic interest by studying Val’s cracked core in earnest.

Who knew that working on a shared project without the threat of impending doom was good for team cohesion, thought Val with a chuckle. While Noir’s paranoia and back-handed compliments continued unabated, they had begun offering up relevant tidbits of information of their own volition, just as they had with the voices coming down the hallway. In the past three days, Noir’s insights had even started to come in the midst of combat, enabling Val to occasionally dodge a hit or get a surprise strike in.

The voices suddenly got much louder as the door to the training room opened, letting two figures in from the hallway. The corners of Val’s mouth turned up in a smile behind her opaque visor as she watched Celedon walk in with Fynn close on his heels. The smirk on Celedon’s face made it clear how much he was enjoying needling Fynn, who seemed to be barely containing his annoyance.

“And here’s your sparring partner, as promised,” said Celedon, pointing towards Val with an exaggerated flourish.

“I already told you, I don’t need another sparring partner,” replied Fynn, stopping just outside of the pit and giving Celedon a glare.

“Ahh, come on, Fynn. Has your mentor ever led you astray?”

“I’ve finished my Scout rotation already, Celedon. Even if you drag me off to one of your Guild’s training rooms, I don’t have to go along with your twisted sense of training anymore.”

Celedon grabbed at the material of his shirt in dramatic fashion. “You wound me, young Fynn! Such cruel words for your teacher for all these years. I’ll admit my training is… unorthodox, but you can’t deny its effectiveness.”

Val struggled to suppress the urge to laugh at the obvious conflict on Fynn’s face. Having been in his shoes dealing with Celedon, Val sympathized. But I have to admit, it’s pretty funny when I’m not the target. Looking over, Bri also seemed to be stifling a laugh at Fynn’s expense. It hadn’t been her intention to prank Fynn like this, but Val should have expected nothing less from the sadistic Scout Guildmaster. Without giving Fynn a chance to compose himself and respond, Celedon clapped a hand on Fynn’s shoulder and pushed him into the ring.

“See, even you cannot deny it. Now, get in there and let me see how much you’ve improved since becoming a User.”

Fynn shot another glare at Celedon, but gave a resigned sigh before fixing his gaze on Val. A slight shiver went through her body as a switch seemed to flip in Fynn as he started to take their impending fight seriously. His eyes swept over her body, cataloging the knife and pistol before addressing her directly.

“Well, I would apologize for any inconvenience caused by Celedon setting this up, but I assume since you are here, you’re game for a friendly spar?”

Val simply nodded, not wanting to give herself away just yet. Excitement started to well up from deep within her chest. As happy as Val was to talk to Fynn, she was also looking forward to seeing how well she stood up against Fynn after the past week of training. She bounced around lightly on the balls of her feet and pulled out her weapons, pistol in her right hand and knife in the left.

“Small arms and mixed range, huh?” Fynn’s eyes flicked towards Celedon for a fraction of a second. Anger flashed across his face so quickly that Val would have missed it if she wasn’t paying close attention. She knew what he was thinking. It would be very on-brand for Celedon to pit Fynn against someone that reminded him of Val just to force him to deal with her absence.

With Noir’s enhanced sensitivity for nano, Val felt it when Fynn activated his own subroutines. Nano swarmed up over his exosuit, encasing his head in a helmet and bulking up his armor. Power swelled near his hands before nano ballooned out into a kite shield and a shortsword. The matte black material looked fairly nondescript, but Val knew how strong nano constructs were after failing to make even a dent in Zavis’s shield.

Power surged down her own arms, activating the whining edge of her knife and infusing the round in her pistol’s chamber. The room was still for a moment as Val and Fynn stared at each other with both their techniques active. Suddenly, as if by some unspoken agreement, Val and Fynn burst into movement at the exact same time as they charged towards the center of the room.