Superhero CITY - The Test

Chapter Fourteen (edited)

"So now can I talk, Jason?" Natalia's sarcastic question cutting through the atmosphere around us with the sharpened edge of bitter humour laced through it.

I sighed. "Look, I'm going to say that I'm sorry and that I'm not. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, and I usually find your good-humoured teasing to be amusing rather than annoying, even when you go too far with it. For that I sincerely apologize. But I'm not going to ask for forgiveness when you end up crossing that line and hurting one of our friend's feelings. I guess that we all need to be better."

"Yeah, fine. Good."

"Good."

After breakfast, we walked back to the dorms together, only splitting off only when we got to the corridor that had the girls at one end, and the boys at the other. We were on the sixth floor, with all three senior year groups – eleven, twelve and thirteen – together. Separated by a single hallway, all boys were at one end of the building and all girls at the other. Each floor below us held two year groups separated the same way; ten and nine shared, as did eight and seven, six and five, four and three, with two and one grouped on the first floor. The ground level held a mammoth library, study rooms, a lounge, a television room, and a recreational pool.

It had been set up so that the youngest, and therefore most vulnerable, students had the closest access to the exits and teachers if need be. There was only one official entry point to each floor, but during an emergency there were several back-up escapes with silent alarms to alert the staff that we were shown regularly. Everyone knew about them, but no one used them to sneak out.

There was only ever one or two attempts per year, and watching the teachers arrive in battle suits and bristling with weapons was enough to anyone else from trying.

Even with the annual false alarms, there were still enough attacks on the academy by villains, criminals and foreign intelligence that we couldn't make light of it. Our nation trained almost every superhero in the world, and this academy formed many of the best ones. It was the most prestigious school in Imperium, despite it's remote location, and even though none of the other institutions on our island were anything to laugh at, Wilde's Academy also had the highest security to ensure the protection of their highest-profile attending students until we had graduated and proven capable to look after ourselves.

I could often hear many of the other students grumbling outside of class – no one was daring enough to speak in such a way where staff might overhear – about how we couldn't do things that somebody at such-and-such could. But I didn't complain, didn't see the need to.

When you've spent your entire life surviving kidnapping and assassination attempts on both your family, and your child self, a little precaution is comforting. I still was unable to resist the temptation to plan for every conceivable scenario, but at least here I didn't feel like I would need to use those plans.

I still thought about them, though.

On every day since we'd begun practising, I'd brought out modified editions of these plans for our upcoming battles in the competition. It took only quarter of an hour to clean up, get dressed into our cadet suits, and meet back up in the one of the ground floor study rooms.

Classes began at twenty past eight, so we got in around just under half of an hour before beginning a morning race to the classroom at quarter past. Pouring over pages and pages of my writing, making plans on what we could and couldn't use, forcing that fear of the unknown out of our systems with the knowledge we'd acquired about ourselves and every other team on the grounds.

About how to win.

It was a Sunday morning, so instead of going to class like we had Thursday and Friday, or spending the entire day alternating between theoretical and practical match preparations like during Saturday yesterday, instead I was going off on my own.