Chương 51: 50: The Twelve Prototypes IV

/// For a moment, nobody moved. Then Atlas slowly grinned.

"He looks strong."

"That's the understatement of the century," Miriam laughed. Yuna tilted her head.

"Think he's actually dangerous?"

"I'm more interested in the coat," Cass admitted.

"Where do you even buy something like that?"

"You don't," Gideon said confidently.

"Definitely tailored."

"No one asked you."

"He looks expensive," Naomi observed. Mateo folded his arms.

"Good. I've always wanted to punch expensive." Victor rolled one shoulder, smiling.

"Dibs." Freya's pale eyes never left Lucien.

"He's testing us."

"So are we," Elias replied. Lucien never acknowledged them. His thumb continued moving across the face of his watch. Click. Tiny circular ports opened beneath the sleeves of his ash-coloured coat. One. Then three. Then dozens. Small black discs, each scarcely larger than a coin, drifted into the air.

"Drones?" Linh frowned. The discs unfolded. Needle-thin blades sprang from their rims with crisp metallic snaps. Click. Click. Click-click. Each machine bloomed into a spinning mechanical flower. Their rotations climbed steadily until the air vibrated with a metallic hum. Lucien kept typing.

"Prototype endurance trial. Blade Drones. Age fifteen. Let's see." The hum vanished. They launched. Approximately seventy-nine percent of light speed. BOOOOOM! The first drone reached Victor before the sound of its launch. He twisted aside, the spinning blades missing his throat by less than a millimetre. One hand snapped out, seized the drone, and hurled it through three ice mountains before it buried itself beneath the glacier, still spinning. Victor laughed.

"Right! These are fun!" Three more arrived. Yuna dissolved into a blur of cyan kinetic silhouettes. The drones carved harmlessly through fading echoes before she reappeared behind them with a smile.

"So pretty…" Atlas remained where he stood. A drone struck his chest. SKRAAAAAAA. Blades screamed across his skin, showering sparks in every direction. They shattered. The ruined drone bounced harmlessly from his shoulder. Atlas blinked.

"That's disappointing." A second drone hit his forehead. It exploded. He scratched the spot.

"Slightly better." Across the glacier, Gideon sprinted sideways. His boot found polished ice.

"Oh, bugger." He slipped. WHRRRK. A passing drone neatly shaved away the entire left side of his hair before disappearing into a mountain behind him. Gideon lay staring at the sky.

"I had that hairstyle for six years." Cass doubled over laughing.

"You're half bald!"

"I KNOW!" Mateo caught a spinning drone between both palms. His boots carved trenches hundreds of feet long before he finally brought it to a stop.

"Heavy." The drone beeped.

"Uh-oh." He threw it. The explosion erased a nearby mountain. Naomi ducked beneath two drones while freezing the surrounding air. Sheets of black ice spread across their flight paths. The machines struck the barrier, adjusted instantly, and curved around it.

"They learn?"

"Interesting." Freya answered by raising an entire mountain of ice. Thirty drones struck at once. Thousands of spinning blades bored perfect tunnels through the glacier before bursting from the opposite side without losing noticeable speed.

"Right. So not ice." Linh compressed gravity around another drone. Its flight slowed. The blades fought the distortion. A moment later, they powered straight through.

"Well... that answers that." Miriam answered with emerald fire. Flames engulfed several drones. They accelerated through the inferno completely unharmed.

"Ridiculous." Elias simply stepped into one. SHNK. It buried itself halfway into his shoulder. The motor strained. Blades spun uselessly against muscle too dense to cut any deeper. He glanced down.

"Close." His hand closed around the drone. Crunch. Roman answered with lightning. Blue-white bolts tore through the sky, striking drone after drone. Some exploded outright. Others tumbled briefly before stabilizing and returning to the assault.

"HA! Those count!" Nearby, a drone sliced cleanly through a prototype's forearm. The severed limb spun away.

"Argh." Before it touched the ground, muscle fibres lashed outward like living cables. The arm reversed direction and slammed back into place. SNAP. The prototype flexed their fingers.

"Still works." Lucien continued typing. Atlas. Frontal durability exceeds Blade Drone Mark III penetration threshold. Victor. Reaction speed exceptional. Freya. Environmental manipulation insufficient against adaptive guidance. Roman. Electromagnetic output capable of disabling early production units. Elias. Tissue density exceeded projected values. Regeneration satisfactory. A faint smile touched his lips.

"Good." Pearl answered with a pleased little chime from his shoulder. Below, the prototypes laughed, dodged, caught, destroyed, and improvised. They weren't fighting Lucien. They were answering his questions. — If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. The observation platforms fell deathly silent. Keyboards stopped clicking. Pens hovered above notebooks. Nobody dared clear their throat. The scientists simply stared. Sweat beaded across foreheads despite the subzero air.

One researcher slowly lowered his binoculars, his knuckles white.

"What does he want?" someone whispered. Nobody answered. Another swallowed hard enough for the room to hear.

"He isn't attacking."

"Then why is he here?"

"I thought he was going to destroy the facility."

"Or expose us." A senior analyst never took his eyes off the ash-coloured figure.

"He hasn't even acknowledged us." A younger technician shifted uneasily.

"Does he want the Conflict Drop?" Another scientist shook his head.

"He already has technology centuries beyond ours."

"Then the prototypes?"

"To recruit them?"

"To steal them?"

"To kill them?" Silence. None of the possibilities felt right. An acrid smell drifted through the observation room. Several heads slowly turned. One of the interns had gone pale. He looked down at himself.

"… Oh." Nobody laughed. — When the last drone fell silent, Lucien finally stopped typing. Still floating high above the frozen proving grounds, he raised one hand towards empty air. Blue motes blossomed across his open palm like tiny stars gathering into a single point. Two silhouettes materialized. A soft, absent-minded hum arrived first. Simultaneously, loud, enthusiastic chewing echoed through the frozen air. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.

A teenage girl appeared hundreds of feet above the glacier with a startled yelp, nearly dropping the enormous tub of ice cream clutched against her chest.

"H-Huh?!" Beside her floated a boy who looked no older than sixteen, calmly chewing through an entire pineapple, skin, leaves, and all, as though it were an apple.

"Needs more salt," he mumbled around another bite. Before gravity claimed either of them, Lucien casually caught the back of the girl's sweater and the boy's oversized bomber jacket by their collars, leaving them dangling one-handed beneath him. The humming stopped. The chewing didn't.

"It's so cold!" the girl squeaked. The boy glanced around, took another bite out of the pineapple's crown, and frowned.

"This isn't the kitchen." Pearl drifted forward with a cheerful chime. Soft white light wove itself beneath their feet into two hovering platforms. As soon as they solidified, Lucien released them. The girl landed with a tiny stumble, immediately hugging the ice cream closer as the freezing wind tugged at her dreadlocks. An oversized cropped grey sweater hung over a black tank top, a broad cartoon-covered belt cinching striped brown-and-cream knitted trousers above heavy combat boots.

Multicoloured wooden bangles chimed softly around her wrists, while a green nose ring and miniature strawberry earrings glinted beneath waist-length finger-coiled dreadlocks tipped bright yellow. The boy landed lightly beside her, still eating. Tall and wiry, with warm tan skin, thick dark hair streaked crimson, cobalt, and gold spilling from beneath a backwards charcoal snapback, his fractured brown eyes shimmered with those same colours whenever the light caught them.

Concentric red, blue, and yellow tattoos spiralled around his forearms beneath an oversized slate-grey bomber jacket subtly woven with mathematical diagrams. A pixel-art rocket drifted across the loose white T-shirt beneath, while relaxed black cargo trousers disappeared into high-top trainers laced red on one foot and electric blue on the other. He carried the clean scent of rain-soaked concrete, peppermint, fresh graphite, and warm honey. He absent-mindedly finished the pineapple. Leaves included. Mateo squinted.

"…Did..." Victor blinked.

"…Did he just eat the leaves?" Prism swallowed.

"Yeah." Mateo pointed at Mango's belt.

"Those are the characters from Sparky Lunes." Miriam leaned forward.

"They are!"

"You watch Sparky Lunes?" Victor asked, looking genuinely offended. Mateo frowned.

"It's a good show."

"It's for children."

"So?" Even Atlas glanced at the belt.

"I liked the raccoon."

"The raccoon was everyone's favourite," Cass replied. Mango's warm brown skin and ginger hair stood out against the endless white landscape. Round hazel eyes flecked with green darted from the glaciers to the observation platforms, then to the twelve prototypes surrounding her. Beside her, Prism slowly surveyed the frozen continent.

"Neat."

"Neat?" Mango repeated.

"Yeah." He glanced toward the observation platforms.

"…There's approximately a ninety-eight-point-six percent chance they're about to ask us to fight something." Then the air changed. Flowers. Fresh fruit. Warm vanilla. The fragrance spread across the glacier like the doors of an ice cream parlour opening in the middle of a botanical garden. Mango looked down at the untouched tub in her hands, then slowly up at Lucien.

"…Um?" Lucien regarded them calmly, his voice echoing effortlessly across the frozen continent.

"Mango."

"Prism." Several prototypes frowned.

"Mango?" Victor repeated. Naomi tilted her head.

"What kind of names are those?"

"I've heard worse," Mateo shrugged. Roman sniffed the air.

"…Actually…" He sniffed again.

"She kind of smells like fruit."

"So that's what it is," Miriam said, taking a curious breath.

"I thought it was just me."

"And a flower shop," Yuna added.

"There's vanilla too," Cass observed.

"What perfume is that?" Miriam called.

"I want it." Freya quietly shook her head.

"It isn't perfume." The others looked at her. A brief silence followed as several prototypes took another, more deliberate breath.

"She's right," Linh murmured.

"It really is her skin," Naomi said. Atlas nodded thoughtfully.

"Smells nice." Mango looked even more confused.

"L-Lucien? Sir... where am I?" Prism raised a finger.

"Before that…" He looked down at his empty hand.

"Do you have another pineapple?" Mango blinked, reached out, and a pineapple larger than the last bloomed into existence in a shimmer of golden light. Prism's face lit up.

"Whoa!" He accepted it with both hands.

"Thank you." CRUNCH. The prototypes stared.

"…She just grew that," Mateo said.

"Plant powers," Naomi concluded.

"That explains the fruit," Roman nodded.

"And the flowers," Yuna added. Cass snapped her fingers.

"That's why she smells like an orchard." Atlas gave an approving nod.

"Useful." Miriam grinned.

"I want one." Mango looked between the pineapple in Prism's hands and the dozen strangers analysing her like a science project.

"Can we go home now?" Lucien ignored the exchange entirely. He raised one hand and gestured toward the waiting prototypes.

"They are stronger than you. Faster than you. Considerably more durable than you. Their regenerative capabilities border on the absurd. Each of them, individually, could kill you a dozen times over." The prototypes exchanged amused glances. Victor grinned. Atlas folded his arms. Roman chuckled. Lucien closed his watch with a quiet click and met their gazes.

"For your training." Silence lingered for a heartbeat. Then he spoke again.

"Stop them." Mango stared at him.

"UHHHH?" Beside her, Prism slowly lowered the half-eaten pineapple still clutched in both hands, skin and all. His mismatched eyes wandered thoughtfully across the line of prototypes.

"All of them?" Lucien gave a single nod. Prism tilted his head.

"Woah. We're gonna die." He took another enormous bite straight through the pineapple's rind, chewing thoughtfully. He swallowed.

"There're lots of them." Prism studied the twelve prototypes in silence. His ability, Solve for X, allowed him to impose any mathematical principle he truly understood onto reality itself. If he comprehended the mathematics, reality obeyed. The limitation wasn't the concepts, but his concentration. He could sustain only two equations at once, one offensive and one defensive. The moment he introduced a third, the oldest dissolved, forcing him to constantly choose which truths deserved to remain real. He sighed.

His mismatched eyes shifted towards Mango.

"We'll both get slaughtered if any of them lands a proper hit." He rubbed the back of his head, thinking, then raised a finger.

"Solve for x." To Prism, every enhancement was simply another variable. Conflict Drop. Lightning. Gravity. Ice. Fire. Extra terms layered onto an original value. The simplest truth required almost no effort. x⁰ = 1. Any non-zero quantity raised to the power of zero becomes one. Reality complied. Lightning left Roman's body. Emerald fire disappeared from Miriam's hands. Naomi's black ice crumbled into harmless frost. The frozen continent stopped answering Freya. Linh's gravity collapsed.

Victor felt the impossible speed drain from his muscles. Silence settled across the battlefield.

"My lightning?"

"My ice…"

"My gravity's gone!" Several instinctively reached for their abilities again. Nothing. Every enhancement had simply been returned to its base value. One. Linh understood first.

"He didn't negate them." Freya nodded slowly.

"He normalized them."

"Math," Roman muttered. Victor flexed his fingers.

"Everything extra…"

"…became its base state," Naomi finished. Understanding spread through the line.

"He's reducing variables," Linh said.

"And anything he defines as x," Freya murmured, "must obey mathematics." Nobody wasted time trying to unravel the mechanics. If his ability truly hinged on mathematics, then he was the more dangerous opponent. Victor moved first. Roman charged with him. Even stripped of every adaptation, the pair crossed the glacier faster than artillery. Prism barely reacted.

"Plane Division." A geometric plane is an infinitely thin surface extending forever in every direction, dividing three-dimensional space into two distinct half-spaces. Prism didn't create a blade. He made that division real. Victor crossed the invisible plane. His body continued forward. Each half chose a different side. There was no slash, only the inevitable consequence of occupying two regions of space at once. Roman followed an instant later. Both prototypes separated cleanly before crashing across the glacier.

Victor's upper body lay several metres from his legs. Roman's arms twitched against the ice as muscle fibres reached desperately across the gaps, only to halt at an invisible boundary.

"Why am I still in pieces?" Roman grunted, trying to push himself upright. Victor frowned, one half of his face lying several metres from the other.

"Conflict Drop should've fixed this." It hadn't failed. Plane Division was still active. As long as Prism maintained that equation, every separated piece remained assigned to its respective side. The serum relentlessly rebuilt their bodies, preserving every fragment alive, but every attempt to reconnect violated the division. Naomi stared.

"They can't reconnect." Linh understood a heartbeat later.

"It's preventing them from ever becoming whole again." Her eyes locked onto Prism. A chill spread through the remaining prototypes. They had watched Conflict Drop recover from complete obliteration. Now a mathematical truth had trapped that regeneration in an endless loop. No one questioned it. If the boy could force reality to obey mathematics, he wasn't merely dangerous. He was the priority. Kill the mathematician. The decision spread almost instinctively. Prism exhaled.

He barely lowered his hand before Freya arrived. Naomi swept in beneath her. Linh descended from above. Three attacks. Three vectors.

"They noticed." Plane Division occupied one of his two active equations. The normalization reducing every enhancement to its base value occupied the other. There was no room for a third. Freya's kick skimmed past his jaw. Naomi's elbow followed. Linh's heel drove toward the back of his head. Prism twisted away, every strike missing by fractions of an inch. They weren't trying to overpower his mathematics. They were exploiting its limits. Plane Division could exist along only one geometric plane at a time.

They attacked from angles it couldn't intercept simultaneously. Naomi understood it first.

"Don't line up!" Linh instantly changed course. Freya split away. They surrounded him.

"Mango!" Before another blow landed, flower petals burst through the frozen air. Mango bloomed above them, a shepherd's sling already spinning a polished blue pebble. The leather cords sang. THWIP! The pebble shot away. A heartbeat later it ricocheted through Freya, Naomi, and Linh like a pinball, every impact detonating with mountain-shattering force. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM. Freya grunted as the blast hurled her through an ice peak. Naomi's eyes widened.

"Strong!" The rest of the sentence disappeared as she tore through two more mountains. Linh folded around the impact with a sharp gasp before disappearing beneath an avalanche of shattered glacier. The pebble rebounded toward Atlas, Mateo, and Elias, changing direction with impossible precision. Before Atlas finished crashing through the third peak, petals bloomed behind him. Mango stepped from them, slipped the sling around his neck, and planted both boots against his back. She leaned away. The sling tightened.

Using Atlas's own momentum, she dragged him headfirst across the glacier like a rider hauling back a runaway horse. Ice exploded beneath them. Mountains burst apart one after another. A canyon miles long tore across the continent before she released him in another bloom of petals, reappearing atop a distant ridge as Atlas shot through yet another mountain.