We were eating lunch, this time with more people in the room, including both Chinook and Terracotta. The cafeteria had the cheerful ambiance of a bomb shelter, but the pizza was surprisingly decent. Terracotta was a very reserved girl, and while we welcomed her to have pizza with us, I was basically convinced that she was going to refuse to join our team on more than a temporary basis. She was here to get an education, a ticket punched, and then intended to return to Kyoto after her schooling was finished, hopefully without any permanent scars or debilitating trauma. A sensible plan. I was almost jealous.

  “I am confused. You’re second year. The rest of this team is first year, why are you interested in joining a freshman team?” Mindy asked her bluntly, no-nonsense as ever. She’d traded her usual flirty demeanor for a team-leader-in-training vibe. It was almost convincing.

  Chinook sighed, a sound of pure exhaustion, and put both of her elbows on the table, resting her forehead in her hands for a moment. She was, of course, good-looking in a fierce, ‘I-can-and-will-break-you’ way, with rich black hair down to her waist when it wasn’t caught behind her neck, golden eyes, and dark skin visible behind her holomask, and a well-toned body that suggested she could run marathons and then bench-press the finish line. “A bunch of reasons. First off, your team support has absolutely got their shit together when it comes to the team stuff, and you remember what Mister Dexter said… most of the good contracts demand at least decent teamwork grades, and mine sucks right now.”

  “Secondly, I tried to go the loner route as a Freshman. I am a solid class four, but my position in the rankings is really delicate.”

  “Hold on,” I asked, swallowing a bite of suspiciously good pepperoni. “Why on Earth is ranking so important? I keep hearing like it’s super vital, but lots of people who have never even been to the academy land jobs in decent regionals or even solo defenders.” It seemed like an artificial numbers game designed by people with clipboards and a sadistic streak.

  She looked at me closely, as if seeing my non-combat-track ignorance for the first time. “You might not understand because of your unique position, but there’s a reason most anchors and cannons go to the monster hunters. Because we are common. The two most common gifts are elemental production and physical enhancement. Elemental production, unlike elemental control, gives you far more potential damage for something like hunting kaiju, but it doesn’t give the versatility that control does.”

  “What elemental production doesn’t give you is any extra durability. However, fortunately, for two gifts, physical enhancement is almost always the second gift. So basically, that’s what I am… two gifts, elemental production and physical enhancement. The most common combination on Earth. If I can’t get a good team or protector position, that just leaves the monster hunters.”

  “So...what’s wrong with the monster hunters?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. The name itself had a high mortality rate.

  She shrugged, a gesture that spoke of resigned fatalism. “My two gifts are basic enhancement and air elemental production. My enhancement is decent, but not anything compared to most purely physical anchors. I am pretty good at duels because I have insane endurance, and air production lends itself to both flight and ringouts. But with the new Freshman class participating in ratings, I have no idea what’s liable to go down… I figure the only reason I even got rank twelve was because I was the lucky paper to this year’s rocks. I will probably be in the low twenties before I can blink.”

  “What’s wrong with the monster hunters? I’d be a casualty in a week. Air doesn’t give the kind of attacks it takes to drop monsters quickly, and enhanced physicality without something like metal control, shapemod, armoring, or density increase to back it up means I would just make a slightly chewier toy. That means government service or black teams.”

  She lifted her head a little, a flicker of ambition breaking through the weariness. “On the other hand, the team competitions are technically even more important. There are twenty-six freshmen alphas this year, and from what I have seen, you guys will absolutely have a lock on the top ten for teams, group obstacle, and maybe even gearing and criminology, although gearing almost always goes to widgeteers.”

  “I am already rated as third place for survival. I know it’s kind of a trope among those of us who choose to stick with the tribes, but we learn how to survive in the wilderness, dodge monsters, and fight practically before we learn to walk. And for the team stuff, we could absolutely hit rank one.”

  I nodded, my mind already running the calculations. A high-ranking survivalist with a grudge against the system and a need for a good team. It was either a fantastic asset or a glorious disaster. “I will get back to you.” I needed to see the other offer on the table.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I glanced at Terracotta, and then at Mindy, shrugging a little. She was technically supposed to be the leader of this team, but I seemed to be doing most of the talking. She smiled a little, shook her head, and then waved her fingers at me like ‘go ahead, oh mighty behind-the-scenes puppet master’.

  “Okay, Terracotta, same question.” I turned to the petite Japanese girl, whose power could turn a city block into her personal playground.

  Terracotta nodded, her expression serious. “First, I thank you very much for saving Kelly. I made a mistake. It was very bad. Secondly, I say that my English is good but slow, so sometimes words take time, or I might ask you to repeat words.”

  I nodded, “That’s fine.” I could work with slow and careful. It was better than fast and catastrophically careless.

  “My reasons are much like Chinook. I am a single power, but I am told my single power is very good, very versatile. I saw how you healed Kelly. I saw how you moved. You are a fighter, even if you do not behave that way often. I wish to graduate and bring honor to my family. Of all the teams forming among the first and second years, this is the one that has the most potential, and I want to be part of that potential.”

  “There is also a personal reason. I am slow, I know that, but our training should help… but most teams will see only that one part of my power is not quick, and is klutzy. I owe you for helping Kelly, and this team is my first choice… if you do not choose me, it is not likely any other team will accept me, and I will be with the put-together teams.”

  “Not that those are bad!” she continued, holding up both of her hands in a placating gesture. “Some put together teams are very good because the Academy staff is very good at balancing out known abilities, but it’s still leaving too much up to chance for me to trust their judgment.”

  “As far as what I can bring to the team? I am actually more of a support myself, or I guess they call it battlefield control. I have very good earth control without an element specialization, so I can grab just about anything that comes under the heading of ‘ground’ as long as it’s not pure metal. Sand, rock, gravel, mud, dirt, asphalt, concrete, even glass.”

  “Anything with a silicate structure?” I asked, my inner widgeteer perking up. The applications were endless.

  She nodded, “I think so, but there are many substances I haven’t experimented with. But I think… my elemental label is earth, which means it has some weird limitations. For instance, I can manipulate coal easily, but not charcoal. Nothing really alive except that, you know, something like sod or dirt has living things in it.”

  “I also have REALLY good control usually, I was just… not sure what to do during the exercise. I thought I would need defenses, and much of the Arena doesn’t qualify as earth. So I brought as much rock with me as I could, as armor.”

  “Okay, umm… provisionally, I am cool with having Terracotta as part of the team, but obviously, it’s my sponsor’s decision.” I looked at Mindy, “You get to be the bad guy if the answer is no. Muahahaha.” I wiggled my fingers menacingly.

  “The one thing I am going to insist on is a uniform look. Mostly because I’m going to be making the uniforms, and I am lazy.” I grinned at Mindy, “Would you please go to my room and grab the school bookstore bag sitting on my bed? I finished your outfit, and it’s sort of a prototype, but could you try it on and show us? Time for a fashion show.”

  Mindy hopped up amazingly quickly and dashed into my bedroom, hair flying behind her. Like I said, the new look was probably not as protective as the best armors out there, but I was pleased to note that it was sturdy as hell and while it took me a lot of energy to make, the expense was not crippling… and now that I had the whole damned thing blueprinted, I could make more of them just by heading to a junkyard for materials. My power: turning trash into marginally less deadly trash.

  She came back out wearing a dark gray baggy stretch suit and a hood with a half-mask. For the most part, it looked more like a neoprene diving suit than a super suit, with varying thicknesses of material. Honestly, while it was a lot thinner than combat armor, the patches I’d put in for joint support, vitals protection, and the like were stolen from the more popular types of BMX and combat armor.

  Of course, since I was using stuff like carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, interlaced fibrous zircon and super synthetic reinforced spidersilk for the suit’s outer layer, and crystalline-interleaved short-fiber nanotubes, layers of crystalline-woven tungsten-bronze interspersed with boron-bromine micro-pneumatic reactive cartilage for shock absorption, and I’d even installed a series of ridiculously thin silicon nanotube batteries that could be recharged easily through regular movements of the myo-cartilage… it was a bit more than it seemed.

  Which was just a needlessly technical way of saying that the armor was about as thick as a rubber suit, but it breathed a lot better, had slightly enhanced defensive strike areas for both combat and defense, extra joint protection to prevent hyper-extension or joint lock breaking, and even a totally normal human could easily survive a drop from a ten-story roof while wearing it and the ‘extra padded’ helmet. I know, because I threw myself off the roof twice while wearing it just to make sure. For science. And a profound lack of self-preservation instinct.

  “You forgot the helmet.”

  Mindy looked at me in surprise, “There’s a helmet?”

  I laughed, “Of course. I don’t have the comms built in yet, but I have a basic computer built into the suit. My software skills are atrocious, but at least right now, it can control the fit and the colors.” It could probably also run Pong, if I had a month to code it.