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  "Dark Matter," our teacher said, strolling through the room. She was something interesting to look at as she was clothed in a dark dress mixed with water. It shimmered and flowed in a mesmerizing way. "Is unlike anything you will ever use in your life. It is very hard to control and is not designed for humans to use in any way, shape, or form.

  "Dark Matter was found under the ocean of this moon, and how it got there was unknown to us. Of course, many things are unknown to us, like how it can defy all the laws of physics ever invented by humankind.

  "This Dark Matter brought humans something to marvel at, to use, to make breakthroughs in, but at a cost... The first darkling morphed almost as soon as humans started to mess around with Dark Matter and wreaked chaos everywhere it went. It was a miracle that humans were able to subdue him with what little ability we had back then.

  "Then, of course, many things happened with Dark Matter that changed the way we viewed the stuff, but that is not what I am here to talk to you all about today. I am here to teach YOU how to use it."

  I watched as she took a little bit of Dark Matter from the bottom of her dress and swirled it around in the air.

  "For all of you that don't know, Dark Matter Manipulation is a relatively easy thing to do, but you will only be able to control so much of it. Getting to the point that you can clothe yourself in the stuff takes lots of time and skill to pull off. I would highly advise you don't do it unless you have at least three years under your belt, or else you might end up naked in public."

  The class laughed at that, but our teacher stared those kids right in the eyes.

  "You think I'm joking?" she said. "That has happened to many a kid, and it is not a fun thing to experience."

  The kids grew quiet and attentive. Our teacher demanded that type of respect.

  "My name is Mrs. Ralfson," she said. "I have one rule in my class: do as I say, or I will force a consequence upon you that will most likely involve you doing something embarrassing in front of the class."

  She strode out from behind her desk and called out a name. Some poor kid came up to her desk and looked up at her.

  "Take some dark matter," the teacher said, removing some from the bottom of her skirt. "See how much you can move it. Feel it with your mind. Rip it away from my control."

  I watched as the kid's face scrunched up and he slowly lifted it into the air before he collapsed onto the floor in a heap. Our teacher offhandedly called for a medic and continued her lecture.

  "Humans are not meant to manipulate Dark Matter," my teacher emphasized. "It takes lots of practice to wire your brain to control yourself."

  I was thinking that maybe I would be using the man in that cave after all. He was more forgiving than THIS.

  I put my hand in the air.

  "What is it?" asked Mrs. Ralfson.

  "What are humans wired for?" I said, ignoring the snickers that went up around me.

  "Don't ask me stupid questions," the teacher told me. "See me after class for a punishment."

  I sank into my seat. This was going to be a long year after all.

  The rest of the class, my teacher droned on about how to use Dark Matter, and one by one she brought a kid up to the front to see how they responded to Dark Matter manipulation. One by one, kids couldn't do anything to the blob, or they fainted on the spot.

  At last the class ended, and Mrs. Ralfson looked at me, so I made sure to hang behind. Harper and Michael both gave me a worried look as I left the classroom, but when they saw the look that Mrs. Ralfson gave them, they hurried out soon enough. At last it was just us in the classroom.

  "What do you think your punishment should be?" my teacher said, looking down at me. I really hated that she was taller than me.

  "I don't know," I said. "Detention maybe?"

  "You stupid recruits," she said, laughing. "You really think we still give you things like detention anymore? No, we make you do something really embarrassing. Something that will make sure you never mess up again."

  I didn't like the sound of this, but I still asked the dreaded question.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Ask a girl by the name of Mekana to give you a consequence. Tell her that I sent you," Mrs. Ralfson said and promptly exited the room. I waited a second and walked out behind her. Great, now I had to do this stupid thing and get it over with.

  AND DON'T FORGET TO RECORD THE WHOLE THING, I read, getting a text on my flesh-watch. I EXPECT YOU TO BE DONE WITH IT BY THE NEXT TIME I SEE YOU IN CLASS.

  It just kept getting better. I stormed off to our common room and told the others what had happened. When Harper heard the name, she seemed taken aback.

  "Her?" she said. "I've seen her around. She's one of those people that wears Dark Matter around. She's always sweating to death, working out by the obstacle courses. She's fairly pretty too."

  I blushed. Leave it to my TEACHER to actually leave me a good consequence and then Harper to go and make it complicated. All on the first day of school, no less.

  "I'll probably do it tomorrow morning or something," I said, trying to change the subject, but nobody wanted to talk, so we went to bed early. Harper had really ruined the mood.

  Early the next morning, I found Mekana beating up a punching bag in an outfit that consisted of shorts and a tank top that cut off around the belly, presumably to conserve Dark Matter. I vaguely remember Mrs. Ralfson saying that it was always men that clothed in Dark Matter before women, since the men had less surface area to cover.

  "What do you want?" Mekana said, looking at me like I was an annoying speck. I turned on my recording and told her about the consequence. She immediately stopped her workout and looked at me with a gleam in her eye.

  "I love when she brings you boys to me," she said. "I love making them do the most humiliating things. Always gives me a good laugh."

  Great. Just great.

  "Okay," she said. "I want you to come to my room for about an hour before class so I can give you something to wear for the rest of the day."

  I groaned but knew I had to go along with it, so I followed her up to her room and sat down in a chair in front of a mirror she had gestured at. Sure enough, she came back with a box of makeup. I was getting a freaking makeover.

  When I came out of her room, I looked like a total idiot. I was wearing a pair of very short shorts and a sports bra while my face was covered in makeup. I also felt stupid because I had to stuff the gold stuff into the sports bra and the shorts so I looked like a total idiot with a very big chest and butt. This was going to suck.

  That day I went to my history class and was laughed at the whole time. It really sucked because I felt like the history class would have been interesting to me, but instead it was a nightmare. I ended up going back and watching the recording of the class when I had the stupid outfit off.

  At the end of the day, I sent the video of my entire day to Mrs. Ralfson and hoped that she would be satisfied. Shortly after, I got a text from her that she had pardoned my horrible sin, so I took off my stupid outfit and burned it before going into the living room to greet my friends that I hadn't talked to all day.

  Harper was snickering on the couch. Figures. I glared at her.

  "It's not funny," I said. "It really is not funny."

  My friends started laughing and couldn't seem to contain their mirth. I went to my room and slammed the door. I didn't want to deal with them right now, so instead I rewatched the history lesson and learned quite a bit of interesting things, like how the Dark Lord had come to be and why darklings eventually took over Mars as their home base.

  Apparently, this Dark Lord had been like any other darkling, albeit with quite a bit of power, when a very strong, evil force entered him, creating a powerful monster beyond anyone's imaginations. The reason that they landed on Mars? They did that because it was the last habitable planet or moon and they hated it there, and wanted to destroy humanity because of it.

  Of course there were a lot of details to this and stuff, but that was the brunt of the story.

  I went to bed that night very annoyed at what had happened that day, but I was excited for the next day because we had a class called military strategy and aptitude placement. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

  "The military," a grizzled old man said, sitting on a wooden chair. This man had Dark Matter swirling around him in a sort of cloud. He was powerful, that was for sure, and when I looked closer at his face, I realized that he was the same man that had attacked me when I was attacking the darkling that had morphed. "Is the only thing between us and death."

  The old man started to draw something on the map as he talked.

  "There is only one thing between Earth and Mars, the stronghold of the Dark Lord. That one thing is a space armada of hundreds of thousands of ships that fight the darklings day in and day out.

  "This might seem like we have everything under control, but I warn you now: we have nothing under control. Each day the darklings kill hundreds, and each day we only have a couple people to replace them."

  The old man finished his drawing of a line in between two planets: Earth and Mars. I grimaced at the swirling mass that was attacking the wall ruthlessly.

  "Grim, right?" the old man said. "But we have one hope, and that is this academy. Without all you young people being trained up correctly, this battle would already be a lost cause. Still, the moment you go on the battlefield, you have a very high chance of dying, though some places have a higher mortality rate than others, and this is basically what I am here to talk to you all about for the rest of the year."

  The old man wrote a name on the board. It read GROAZE.

  "You may call me Groaze and nothing else," the man said. "If you call me anything else, I will dangle you from the ceiling of my class for an entire day."

  Something told me he was dead serious about that. The rest of the class was quite boring though, to be honest. He talked about different positions you might take once we joined the military, and he covered them in quite a bit of detail. Today we covered pilots, shielders, and reserves.

  I personally found pilots to be self-explanatory besides the fact that as a pilot that can control dark matter, you can try to pummel people with the stuff.

  Next was shielders, which would be a very dull, dangerous position to be in. Basically, you and a bunch of other shielders would put up a shield of dark matter around a fighter and would try their best to protect it from the inside out. The only catch is if they break through the shield, you're most likely dead, because your ship will be blown to smithereens.

  The last thing that you can do is called a reserve, and you basically sat in a nice cushy seat and held onto dark matter, so when big powerful guys ran out of dark matter you could supply them more. This job seemed to have the lowest mortality rate, but you had to have a big capacity and a low amount of skill to be able to do it.

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  I found the whole class stupid because none of us could even lift a small amount of dark matter with our minds without fainting or something, so why would we need to learn about different positions right now?

  The day I could control enough to make a shield would be the day that I would decide to be a shielder, you know?

  Anyway, after the class, our little trio went and played a game of cards in our common room. It was poker, and we were playing with chips; the winner got to pick a dare to inflict on the person that got dead last. It was quite a bit of fun, and I ended up getting to make Harper go out onto the balcony and jump off with a foldable glider that I had found in her room.

  "This is so stupid," Harper said, looking over the railing. I had already strapped the glider to her back.

  "Not really," Michael said. "I did some research with my flesh-watch, and this should be perfectly safe with the combination of thick atmosphere and low gravity."

  Harper glared at him like she hated that he had said anything. I felt her pain. Trying to argue with Michael was like trying to argue with AI. AI always won.

  "Anyway," I said, giving Harper a little shove over the edge. "Have fun!"

  She plummeted over the edge but then caught the air with the glider and floated to a stop on the field below where she packed up the glider into a little backpack.

  "That actually looked sick," I said as I got a glider out of my room, and before I knew it both me and Michael were flying down onto the field. It felt great having the air whip by my face, and I felt so cool when I came to a landing. Michael face-planted in the dirt.

  "That was awesome," Harper said with a big smile on her face. "Thanks for making me do that. You wanna go try out one of the obstacle courses?"

  I said yes, and somehow we ended up on the most difficult one, that went ten feet in the air and if you fell, you would end up in the pool below it. I volunteered to go first and swung across some monkey bars. Not too bad.

  Next up was the things where you have to hop side to side from foot to foot. I got past that one, and the next one pretty easily. It was what was after that that had me on my toes.

  A huge rock wall was put up, but in climbing it I would have to hang upside down as I worked my way across. I fell into the water within two seconds of hanging on for dear life.

  "You're up!" I yelled to Harper, who was apprehensively approaching the first obstacle. She got past the monkey bars and the jumping things but fell in on the rock wall too.

  Finally Michael was up, and he fell on the monkey bars right away. Harper and I couldn't stop laughing.

  Then the screaming started again. Harper locked eyes with me, and I could see exactly what she was saying: they can handle it, you better not get involved.

  I shook my head at her and found a quiet spot to transform into my armor, before I once again took matter from those around me. Harper did not understand that I had to help people. I had lived my whole life being the one that was helpless, and now that I was the one with newfound power, I wanted to help the helpless.

  I shot into the air once again to face the threat. There was nothing there except a bunch of kids screaming their heads off, but when they saw me, Dark Matter shot right at me. I only got my shield up in the nick of time.

  Once that was done, I sent out a wave of matter, causing all the kids around me to collapse. I saw Dark Matter coming from one of the side entrances, so I wasted no time plunging into the ground, spewing dirt out behind me to cover my path.

  After ten minutes I erupted back into the ocean and gave a sword a little bit of matter so that it could glow. I flew up to my cave and punched the ground. The earth trembled a little bit.

  "Stupid idiots," I said, punching the wall of my cave again and again. "Don't they realize that I'm just trying to help?"

  "What is the issue?" I heard a voice say. I turned around and saw the old man crouched in his corner. I sighed and figured I might as well talk to him.

  "These people keep turning into darklings, and I try to help, but the people at the academy think I'm a threat. They're trying to hunt me down and kill me."

  The old man stroked his beard in silence for a couple of seconds before speaking up.

  "You just have to know how to keep them on their toes. Would you like me to teach you how?"

  I nodded my head. I might as well.

  The old man took a bit of dark matter from who knows where and gave it to me. I could feel it being pushed upon my consciousness.

  It burned like a blazing rod, and I felt like the world was going to end. The old man stopped and looked at me with a curious look on his face.

  "You've never touched dark matter in your life, have you?" he said. I nodded.

  "Then what is it?" he exclaimed. "What could you possibly be manipulating that can combat my dark matter but isn't dark matter?"

  I shrugged my shoulders. The old man's eyes went wide.

  "Son," he whispered, going into some type of trance. I hurried over to him to see what was wrong, but by that time he seemed to be fine.

  "What did you say about a son?" I asked him.

  "Nothing," he said gruffly. "Nothing for you to be worried about. You were gifted a set of armor by the gimlongs, weren't you?"

  I nodded my head and summoned my armor. The old man hobbled around me, looking on in fascination.

  "No wonder they want to kill you," he murmured to himself. "You could destroy them all."

  "Errr..." I muttered. "I guess so?"

  "You could also destroy the Dark Lord," the man continued to murmur under his breath. "I need to train you! Are you willing to become my apprentice?"

  "I guess you could teach me a thing or two," I said, not wanting to sign some type of binding contract. He nodded his head and took some Dark Matter out.

  "It's really unfortunate I can't guide your mind because it doesn't work with dark matter. I will try to teach you the best I can with my words."

  I stared at the man, a little bit unsure of what to do. Then he spoke.

  "Pull some matter out of your soul and put it in front of you," the man said. I did so. "Once that is done, close your eyes."

  I closed them.

  "Now reach out to the matter and push it inward with your mind. You should feel it struggle, but you have to keep doing it no matter the cost."

  I used my brain to push the matter in. I could feel it push against me, trying to escape my constraints. I gritted my teeth and tried with all of my might to push it harder.

  Finally, something seemed to click. I looked up, and there was a tiny white speck hovering in the middle of the room. The old man put out a blanket of dark matter so I couldn't see him.

  "Try putting it through my shield," he instructed me. I obeyed and found that my little white speck sliced through the darkness like a knife cutting into butter.

  "Very good," the man said, pleased by my performance. "Very good indeed."

  I seemed pleased with his praise, but then he asked me to do the same thing but condense double the amount of matter.

  I took it out of my system and started pressing it together. I felt my brain start to strain and burst, my consciousness start to fade. Suddenly, there was a giant burst of light and darkness followed soon after.

  When I woke up, the old man was above me. I struggled to my feet and looked him in the eyes.

  "You pushed hard," he told me. "Your work is honorable. I will leave you now. Go when you please."

  I collapsed onto the ground and lay there for who knows how long before I finally decided to head back up to the surface.

  When I came up again, I turned my armor back into underclothes and went to undo the shield around my flesh-watch, when I realized that I hadn't put up a shield in the first place.

  "Crap," I said, staring at my wrist. Surely they were going to figure out who I was, and they would find the old man too. I sank to the ground of my cave and stared at my wrist in shock. I was so screwed.

  I probably sat there for thirty minutes, and when nobody came to kill me, it dawned on me that maybe they hadn't figured me out yet. Maybe, just maybe, I was safe. For now.

  So, with that realization in mind, I pried myself off of the floor of the cave and made my way back to the academy.

  When I got back to my dorm, I got a very interesting reaction. This time Harper didn't rush up to me and give me a hug. I didn't see her at all. Only Michael came out of his room to write something out on a piece of paper. It read:

  SHE ISN'T HAPPY WITH YOU RIGHT NOW. I WOULD STAY OUT OF HER WAY. I CAN TELL HER YOU'RE OKAY.

  I nodded at Michael and slunk away to my room to mope. It didn't make any sense to me why Harper would get mad at me for this. I was just trying to help!

  That night I slept very restlessly, hoping that Harper would understand why I had to do this. It was my destiny, I couldn't help thinking. I was MADE to do this.

  I closed my eyes, pondering about how I would try to sway her tomorrow morning.

  "You promised me!" Harper yelled at me. It was tomorrow, and I was trying to reason with her, but reasoning with her was like trying to reason with a rock.

  "I didn't promise you anything," I told Harper. "I have to do this, don't you understand?"

  She shook her head.

  "I don't understand," she said, tears streaming down her face. "These people are just trying to hunt you down and kill you! And you're going straight into their traps. That darkling morphing was just a fluke accident. I doubt stuff like that even happens! Of course now they've caught wind of you, and now they'll try to lure you in at every opportunity. If they need your help, they should ask for it!"

  Harper ran off crying into her room, and I stood there speechless before storming off into my own room.

  That day in class, we sat as far apart from each other as possible. It sucked because as soon as our teacher started to talk, we both forgot our silly bickering.

  I hadn't thought much about the title: Darkling Defense Class, but once the teacher started to talk, I knew that we were in for a special treat.

  I knew this because he didn't talk, but instead loaded us all into a big flying bus and flew us across Titan's surface until we got to a bunker of some sort. Once we all offloaded, our teacher finally said something.

  "Today, you will all see something truly, utterly evil," he said quietly, almost whispering, but still you could hear his every word because the class had gone completely silent.

  "This evil is a captured Darkling that is way past the 'darkling' stage. Years have gone by after he morphed, and he has grown more and more powerful. I think 'dark beast' is a more appropriate name."

  Our grizzled old teacher led us into the facility where, after we walked through numerous hallways, we entered onto a platform that dangled above a pit that went down as far as the eye could see. I peered down into the pit but could not see anything.

  "That is where he lives," our teacher said. "The walls of this prison are made up of a wall of titanium, and behind that wall is an ocean of water, so that if the monster ever tries to escape, when the water hits his Dark Matter, it would boil him alive. He knows this and has never attempted an escape."

  "How does he survive without any food?" one kid asked toward the back of the class.

  "No one knows why, but Darklings don't seem to need sustenance. This Dark Beast, as I like to call him, is trapped in this pit on five sides by water and has nothing in his pit besides the titanium that surrounds him. If anything else was put in there, he would weaponize it to escape."

  Someone asked if he was even allowed to have simple comforts, but my teacher shook his head, emphasizing how he had absolutely nothing. I wondered if that included clothing, so I asked that.

  "Fair question," my teacher said. "But if you were to use your brain, you would figure out that he clothes in Dark Matter, pure, not mixed with anything else."

  I shuddered as I looked down into the pit. It was so deep that you couldn't see the bottom. Not by a long shot. It had to be hundreds of feet deep.

  Our teacher let us look on for a little longer and then led us to another room where a woman was chained to a wall, clothed in a basic prison jumpsuit.

  "This here is Amanda," our teacher said, nodding to the guard that kept watch. I looked over and saw that Michael was staring at her. He looked like he was staring at a ghost. "She is a darkling that morphed about a year ago. Her power does not grow much, and we find that she is the perfect thing to teach students how to fight darklings. Would anyone like to meet her?"

  Some idiot raised his hand and stepped forward. It was when our teacher opened the door that I saw the Dark Matter beginning to pour out of the woman.

  "I hope you know how to make a shield," our teacher said as he closed the door behind him. I watched in horror as the Dark Matter crept up to the boy ever so slowly. The boy started to shake and sob as a tendril snaked out from the swirling dark mass and pressed against his throat.

  I instinctively let out a wave of Matter, and the darkness disappeared, both from the air and from the lady's eyes. Rage flew into my teacher's eyes.

  "You!" he said, smashing apart the glass between us and the window with a bit of Dark Matter. "What have you DONE?"

  At first I thought he was going for me, but then I realized he was attacking the poor chap that had volunteered himself. The boy's neck was enveloped with Dark Matter and what I figured was titanium. I shook as he was lifted into the air.

  "What did you do?" our teacher whispered and held the boy still. With each passing second, I saw the life drain out of his face, so I let another wave of Matter sweep from me. The boy dropped to the floor, and the teacher winced.

  "It's getting stronger," our teacher said, looking us each in the eye. It took him quite a bit, as there were around a hundred of us jammed into the room. "We must kill him!"

  Suddenly, my teacher exploded as Dark Matter seized each and every kid by the neck, hauling them into the air.

  "I should just kill the lot of you now and get it over with," he sneered. I knew that he would kill us all too. I was too big of a threat to these people.

  Then I had an idea. A wonderful, horrible idea. With my mind, I took a little bit of the gold from my undergarments and sent it into the pit that we had come from. Then, when I felt something take hold, I lifted that something back into the air.

  The building next to us exploded.

  I was swept into the air by water that was unbearably hot, and found myself swirling around in a cyclone with a strange dark mass in the middle of it all.

  THAT'S THE DARK BEAST, I realized as I whizzed around so fast that I couldn't see much else. I felt the air itself shuddering and bending under the creature's weight.

  This evil, this power was unlike anything I had ever felt before.

  Then, something burst through one of the walls of the swirling madness and dove straight at the monster. It was our teacher that hadn't even told us his name yet.

  Our teacher had a shield of Dark Matter around him and was immediately swallowed up by water and whatever else this beast was controlling.

  Boom! The sphere that had been my teacher exploded, and pieces of titanium went everywhere, bursting through the wall that was orbiting around the beast.

  Then something else burst through another wall. This one was surrounded by a more fluid Dark Matter. I realized with a start that it was our teacher, Groaze.

  How did he get here so quickly? I wondered as I saw him plunge straight into the belly of the beast. I gasped as I saw his body fly into the cyclone of carnage that I was currently trapped in.

  Then another shape entered the fray. This time it was the prison guard. He didn't stand a chance and was killed on the spot. I watched as pure Dark Matter overwhelmed him. His bones entered the cyclone.

  Boom! Another shape broke through the chaos. This time it was a woman I didn't recognize, but she fought valiantly, making the cyclone waver for a second.

  THEY WILL NOT DEFEAT THIS BEAST WITHOUT YOU, I heard that strange voice say into my head. FIX THE WRONG THAT YOU HAVE DONE.

  Immediately I thought about what the old man had told me. I was going to have to try it. It was all or nothing.

  I sucked all the matter from every person around me and levitated it into a sphere, hovering above the hole on the top of the cyclone. I pushed with all my might, trying to condense the ball of matter as much as I could without letting go of my hold. The horrible beast's eyes locked straight onto mine as a wave of Dark Matter shot right at me.

  With the last of my strength, I pushed the condensed ball of Matter onto the creature, and a large mushroom cloud went up. When it cleared, all that was left was a ball of Dark Matter swirling around in the air.

  Finally, my teachers attacked it and beat it down. Sadly, I didn't get a chance to watch the end of the fight because I fell unconscious from the power that I had just exerted.