* * *
The rest of the team was crazy, Nancy concluded instantly.
She was in a training room surrounded by high tech equipment and lethal weapons watching the group try to kill each other for practice.
Johnny and Ackers were standing beside her, but Nancy couldn’t help thinking that they were all in danger just for being this close to the group, which was currently sparring with a robotic army and, as far as Nancy could tell, each other.
Three of the robots attacked Big Petey, a huge giant of a young man with muscles bulging out of his shirt. The robots punched and pummeled Big Petey, but he didn’t seem to feel any of the hits. He actually laughed at one of them.
Then the robots tried to all jump on top of him and bring him to the ground. Big Petey waited until they were all on top, then he gathered them together in one giant ball, and threw all three of them into the nearby wall. Nancy watched as they landed in a scrap heap, too twisted and scrunched together to do anything else.
Red crept up behind Big Petey. She was slightly older than him, in her late twenties, and had a fiery temper to match her hair. She decided this was the best time to attack Big Petey. She had various types of explosives strapped to her, and while Big Petey wasn’t watching, she came up behind him and slapped some ball-shaped goo onto his back.
Red ducked as Big Petey swung a meaty fist behind him.
“You want to play?” he asked her right before the ball attached to his back exploded.
Instead of sending him flying across the room, the goo pulled Big Petey down toward the ground, anchoring him flat on his back.
“I want to play,” Red confirmed as she looked down on him. “Next time watch your back.”
Big Petey tried to get up off the ground but he seemed to be stuck there.
“I thought that’s what you were for?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Not today, sweetie,” she laughed as she walked away.
Ackers turned to regard Nancy, “She’s an explosives expert. Except her explosives usually do everything but explode in the conventional sense. She makes them all herself, which should please you immensely, and frustrates me to no end. She’s pretty talented for someone who isn’t me,” he explained.
Nancy turned her attention to the next member of the group. In the middle of the training area stood a skinny looking guy in his mid to late thirties. He was holding a pencil and clipboard in his hand, and he had really thick glasses that looked like they threatened to drive his head down to the ground. His name was Vinnie, and he didn’t look very formidable or capable of defending himself.
He mumbled to himself as he walked into harm’s way, with a group of robots attacking him from all sides.
“The probability of the next attack,” Vinnie mumbled to himself as he ducked a punch from one robot, sidestepped a strike from another, and then put himself right in between the two adversaries, “should be coming from angles relative to the opportunity of best advantage as it is perceived from a mechanical viewpoint.”
Both robots pulled out laser pistols and aimed them at Vinnie.
“Hence the most obvious solution, and the only real source of victory…” Vinnie mumbled to himself.
The robots fired just as Vinnie ducked. The laser blasts sailed harmlessly over his head and both robots ended up shooting each other in the chest.
“…is to duck,” Vinnie concluded.
The robots stood there for a moment, their circuits sputtering and shorting out, before falling over with a large, heavy clunking sound.
Vinnie kept mumbling to himself as he walked over to Ackers, Nancy and Johnny. He never looked up at them as he walked, he just kept jotting down notes on the clipboard he held in his hand.
“That was very impressive,” Nancy commented.
“Not really,” Vinnie answered, still looking at his notes. “It was really more of an inevitability; if one knows the proper angles of attack and thought processes of his opponent, there really is only one outcome to ultimately destroy them.”
“Vinnie is a probability expert, psychologist and battlefield strategist,” Ackers explained to Nancy. “And he thinks he’s almost as smart as me.”
Vinnie pushed the glasses back firmly onto his nose and shifted his center of gravity back a bit.
“You should see my notes on Ackers,” Vinnie commented. “He’s got inferiority complexes on his inferiority complexes.”
Ackers looked like he was trying to figure out what to say next. He stammered and opened his mouth, but then shut it again and turned away.
“Who’s the newbie?” a voice came from behind Nancy.
She turned around to see a woman, about eighteen years old, dressed all in black. Her long brown hair was tightly pulled back in a ponytail.
“This,” Ackers finally found his voice, “is Silence. And you’ll find that she is anything but her code name.”
“She looks green. Hate to be with her on the battlefield,” Silence continued.
Nancy turned to regard her tormentor.
“I think you’ll find that I can hold my own,” Nancy said.
Silence walked up to her, unsheathing two long swords and twirling them through the air in wide circles, interchanging them both from hand to hand.
“Really? I highly doubt that,” Silence said as she stepped forward, bringing the spinning blades closer to Nancy. “Why don’t you show me?”
“Don’t worry about her. She likes to talk a lot, but you’ll like her better when you get to know her,” Johnny tried to put in.
“I don’t like her at all so far,” Nancy remarked.
“Good,” Silence responded as she came in closer with her spinning weapons.
The blades were very close to Nancy, she could feel the air whoosh by as they passed near her through the spinning arc of the attack pattern.
Lightning quick, Nancy’s hand shot out and she intercepted Silence’s wrist, striking it right on a nerve. Her hand went numb from the impact, and Silence was forced to let go of one of her swords as Nancy kicked the other one to the ground.
The first sword flew out of her hand and sailed through the air. It went right past Ackers’ head, narrowly missing him and impaling itself in the wall.
For a moment everyone was frozen. And then Silence and Nancy exploded into a fury of movement. They were attacking and counter attacking each other faster than everyone could keep up. Silence would throw a punch, only to have Nancy duck in underneath it and come up at her side, sweeping her leg low and tripping Silence to the floor.
Silence fell down, but not before grabbing Nancy and flipping her. Both girls went down, and both started attacking and blocking each other before they could even stand up.
Everyone was focused on the fight except for Ackers, who turned his head and looked at the sword sticking out of the wall.
“Did you see how close that came to me?” he asked, but no one was listening.
Nancy threw a series of punches that had Silence barely blocking in time. Silence finally grabbed Nancy’s wrist and bent it backward. Nancy yelled out in pain. Silence grabbed the other wrist and bent it back also.
“Yield,” Silence demanded.
Nancy stopped trying to fight back and free her wrists. Instead, she twisted her body in an arc, tangling Silence’s hands and forcing her arms to cross in an unnatural way.
Silence had no choice but to let go.
Nancy kicked out at Silence, who dodged out of the way and then lunged back at her. Nancy retreated to the wall and waited for Silence to strike again. When she did, Nancy dove aside and let Silence run into the wall. But when Silence got there the wall didn’t stop her, she actually ran up the wall and came to a stop, standing on its side.
Ackers was still looking from the blade back to everyone else.
“Don’t tell me no one saw it, because you were all looking. That sword came very close to my head and I want an apology,” he stated. But again, no one was listening.
Nancy was c
aught off guard. Silence was actually crouching on the side of the wall!
Before Nancy could really react to what gadget or technique allowed Silence to do this, the attack was on again.
Silence rained down a series of punches and it was all Nancy could do to block or dodge them in time. Whenever Nancy tried to attack back, Silence would just side step up the wall and out of her reach. After a series of exchanges where Nancy could not gain an advantage, she decided to step back away from the wall and break the engagement.
That’s when Silence struck the finishing blow. Vaulting herself off the wall and straight at Nancy, Silence extended her hands forward in tight fists. Nancy brought up her own hands to guard, but that’s exactly what Silence wanted her to do. At the last instant, Silence opened up her fists and grabbed Nancy’s wrists. Silence used her momentum, and Nancy’s anchoring hands, to flip over Nancy and come down behind her. Then she continued the movement by bending and pulling while still holding on. Nancy had no way of stopping herself, and the momentum lifted her off the ground and sent her up into the air.
Silence released her grip and everyone watched as Nancy flew through the air and crashed into the far wall. She slid down, landing in a crumpled heap, and lay dazed and out of breath against the wall.
No one moved or said anything. And then Ackers started up again right where he left off, completely oblivious to the tension in the room.
“I’m not kidding, it was really close. I’m still waiting for an apology.”
Johnny looked uneasily at Silence, who only smirked back at him in a self-confident stare, and then made his way slowly over to Nancy.
Nancy started using the wall to push herself back up to a standing position.
“So, that’s the team,” Nancy said as he approached.
Johnny couldn’t tell if she was mad or not.
“That’s the team,” Johnny said weakly. “I hope you don’t mind working with them.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Nancy said through clenched teeth while she held her side in pain. “It gives me a chance to even up the score.”