“Come, she who wishes to be known as Erika,” the man said, pushing past the two women.

  Erika tried not to flinch at the man’s blunt words as her mind started to race. How does he know?! Her eyes flicked to Pinpoint, sure she was going to find a gun pointed at her face, but to her surprise the hero’s weapons were still holstered.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, motioning for her to follow the shirtless man.

  Numbly, Erika traced the unnamed man’s footsteps as her thoughts whirled. Not even two weeks since she’d seen that name again, and things felt out of her control. She didn’t like it. Erika Sato wasn’t just an alias, it was supposed to be her new life. A fresh start, unconnected to what came before. Then she’d awakened a power, one that called her new life just an alias. It’d thrown her off balance. Now two people knew Erika Sato wasn’t who she said she was.

  Even though Pinpoint didn’t seem to care about the man’s casual revelation about her, Erika started to make plans. Just in case.

  The contingencies forming in her head were interrupted as the man led her to one of the warehouse-like buildings and pushed it open to reveal a hallway running across the building splitting it into two sides. On her right was a wall with several heavy looking metal doors with what looked like biometric scanners in place of locks or handles. On her left, a long window interrupted only by a single door, revealing what looked like an indoor shooting range.

  “This way,” the man grunted, palming a door open and walking through. Erika followed him through, only to freeze at the sight in front of her. The supervillain’s security room had the most guns and weapons she’d ever seen before. What was in this room made that one look anemic. Except for a single other door on the opposite wall, every inch of the walls of the room held guns of all sorts. No two seemed the same. It was four walls of death.

  “What are your needs?” the still unnamed man asked, motioning at the walls around him.

  Erika thought of everything she’d been through the past few days. The armed men, the monsters. She liked the power she felt from that shotgun and saw the kind of damage a rifle or even a pistol could do. If she’d had a rifle like the one she’d briefly used in the villain’s lair, mowing down that horde of monsters would’ve been easy. “I want a machine gun,” she said.

  The man fixed her with an unreadable look before he grabbed a long, blocky weapon from the wall with one hand and set it down the table in the center of the room. “Try.”

  Erika grabbed the handle of the weapon with one hand and tried to lift it, only to struggle. With two hands, she hefted it up with a grunt and tried to aim it, but the thing was nearly as long as she was tall.

  “No, the weapon is wrong for you,” the man said, grabbing it out of her hands and placing it back on the wall before she could say anything. Pulling another, smaller gun down, he placed it on the table and motioned for her to pick it up. “Try.”

  This gun was similar to the rifle she’d briefly had in the lair, though the clip was missing, an obvious slot for one was in front of the trigger. Again, Erika picked it up and tried it out. It was far lighter and shorter than the first. Where that one had been almost five feet long, this one was just over three, a bit more than half her height and far more comfortable.

  “Better, but still wrong,” the man grunted, plucking it out of her hands and replacing it with another weapon.

  One after another, the man had her pick up gun after gun. The only comments he offered were whether something was right or wrong for her, and there didn’t seem to be a pattern to it. Large, small, light, heavy, it didn’t seem to matter. Some he deemed right and left on the table, others he deemed wrong and placed back on the wall. After what felt like an hour, a small armory’s worth of weapons lay on the table.

  “Choose a weapon and tell me about it,” the man said, motioning at the table.

  Erika grabbed the closest one and looked it over. It was a stubby looking thing that reminded her of smaller machine guns she’d seen in some action movies. A switch above the pistol grip pointed at three small labels etched into the metal reading “AUTO,” “SEMI,” and “SAFE.” A rectangular hole was in the bottom of the grip for where she assumed a clip would go. “It’s, uh, a machine gun that can shoot rapid fire. The clip goes in the grip and you just point and shoot?”

  Instead of saying anything, the man frowned and walked up to her, seemingly towering over her more than he had before.

  Looking up at the man, she swallowed nervously, her mouth dry as he reached out and plucked the weapon from her hands and almost tenderly caressed it. “This is a Kirland SM785 submachine gun. It is chambered for .45 caliber pistol rounds with a firing rate of 800 rounds per minute. It has an effective engagement range of thirty meters, and accurate up to seventy-five meters. It has a modular rail system to install sights and utilities. Finally, it does not use clips, it uses magazines.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Erika blinked as the man pointed out each part of the gun. It was the most he’d said at once as he taught her about the gun. Even though she wasn’t an expert on guns, she knew a little bit just from pop culture, and what she did know conflicted with what he’d said. “Magazines? Are those different from clips?”

  The man let out a loud sigh. “Wait here,” he said, heading to the other door still caressing the submachine gun. It didn’t take long for him to return holding the gun in one hand and a duffle bag in the other. “It is clear you are a beginner who only knows flawed knowledge from movies and video games. Boris shall educate you,” he said, setting the gun and bag down and pulling several objects out.

  A long, rectangular clip went on the table, followed by another that was curved, then one with two round drums at the bottom, five bullets held together by a strip of plastic, and a long chain of bullets. “This,” Boris started to lecture, picking up the first clip, “is not a clip. It is a magazine. Magazines come in several sizes and shapes. Rectangular magazines, ‘banana’ magazines, and ‘drum’ magazines as an example.”

  Erika looked at the clips—magazines, she mentally corrected herself, as Boris pointed each type out. A question came to mind, but before she could even begin to open her mouth, the man started talking again.

  “This,” he said, picking up the bullets held together by a strip of plastic, is a clip…

  ***

  What felt like hours later, Erika’s stomach growled as she furiously worked to put a gun back together. What started as a lecture about magazines and clips turned into a comprehensive lesson on different types of guns and bullets, how they worked, how to maintain them, and safety and handling.

  Carefully putting the last part into place, Erika looked over the shotgun before racking and dry firing it. The empty weapon made a satisfying mechanical click as she pulled the trigger and she nodded to herself in satisfaction.

  Boris plucked the gun from her hands and looked it over himself before nodding in approval. “Good.”

  That single word filled her with contradictory feelings of success and irritation. Success because he finally approved after who knows how long, irritation because all she wanted to do was shoot the damned guns she’d been learning to assemble, disassemble, and maintain. “Why am I even learning this stuff? Just give me a gun I can use to kill monsters,” Erika grumbled quietly. She hadn’t meant to be heard, but Boris responded anyway.

  Nodding to himself, Boris placed the reassembled shotgun back in its place on the wall before moving to clean up the other weapons on the table.

  “Why are you putting them away? Isn’t one of these going to be mine?”

  “No.”

  “What? What was the point of me learning to take all of these apart and put them back together?!”

  “Carrying a weapon means much more than knowing how to kill with it. A weapon is a tool, and tools that are not maintained will fail you when you need them most. Guns are no different. Many moving parts, many things that can go wrong. Jams, broken mechanisms, misfires, using the wrong loads or bullets. A poorly maintained gun will fail you in combat, and if you are reliant upon it to kill your enemies, you will die. That is the point. I will not allow you to fire a weapon until you have learned how to maintain one.”

  With that, Boris pushed her out of the room and out of the warehouse. Erika tried to protest, but her words died in her throat as something pressed down on her, telling her that she wouldn’t win.

  As she exited the warehouse, she saw Pinpoint, Keoni, and her nameless driver sitting on the porch and drinking. “Finally done?” Pinpoint asked, setting her drink down.

  “No.” Boris shook his head. “Your apprentice has much to learn. You will leave her with me for the week to learn. I will not permit her into the world as she is now.”

  “Wait, what?! I’m not staying here!” Erika shouted.

  “Right,” Pinpoint said, ignoring her protest. “Let’s go boys.”

  Nodding, Keoni and the driver finished their drinks and walked back to the SUV.

  Erika fumed at Pinpoint’s casual decision. “You can’t seriously be ditching me in the middle of nowhere with some weird guy!”

  “Erika,” Pinpoint said in a dangerous tone that immediately made her shut up. “Do you want to survive?”

  Of course I want to survive, she mentally screamed. But it was easier to think the answer than to say it. Licking her lips nervously, Erika tried to say something, but her words caught in her throat as she tried to answer the question. “I…yes.” she croaked.

  “I’ll be blunt. As you are, you won’t make it a month on the streets alone even with the best gear. You’ve only had a week of training. All the fire and passion in the world won’t change that fact. Guns might make killing easier, but that’s only if you know how to use them. An idiot with a gun can just as easily be killed by their own weapon as they can kill others.”

  At Pinpoint’s words, Erika remembered how easily she’d killed the goons in the lair. She hadn’t known what she was doing, hadn’t even known how to take the safety off until Mary showed her, and she’d still killed people while barely knowing what she was doing. The thought of someone shooting her with her own gun sent a chill down her spine.

  “Understand?”

  Erika nodded woodenly.

  “Good, see you in a week.”

  Pinpoint downed the rest of her drink in one smooth motion and patted her on the shoulder as she walked past her and jumped in the SUV.

  Standing in the early afternoon sun, Erika watched as her sponsor’s vehicle drove back down the gravel road, leaving her behind. It wasn’t until the SUV was nearly out of sight that something occurred to her. Pinpoint said she’d be leaving her here for a week. Glancing down at her blood and oil stained clothes, horror crept over her. What was she going to wear?!