It was a little before noon when Braden and I met up in the tallest training chamber I’d seen yet. Lizzy was both benevolent and evil. She didn’t call for the training to be at the crack of dawn, so I was able to get a little bit of rest after walking Rebecca back to her place. That was all very nice of her. My sleep had been improving since I had been taking better care of myself, yet I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to get a little more rest in.


    Then she invited Lori to the training. That was a little less nice of her. The short lady didn’t say a word to me when she walked in and only gave Lizzy a small greeting. In fact, it looked like Lori did everything she could to avoid me. That stung more than I cared to admit. That was still my friend. It didn’t put me in a great mental space to get myself ready to fight Braden either.


    Lizzy was over talking to Braden, probably discussing strategy, and I guess that meant Lori felt the need to do the same. She still looked pretty pissed when she came up to me. Her arms were crossed, and she looked toward the ground, almost like a pouting child. It was a far cry from how Lizzy was interacting with her own teammate.


    “Hey,” I said, lamely. I wanted to apologize so bad for even having the idea to let Val in, but I just had no idea where to begin. How do you even tell someone you’re sorry for something like that?


    She looked up, her brown eyes hard, arms still folded over her chest. All business and that just about killed any chance I had to say sorry. “Morning.”


    It looked like she wanted to say something else. It looked like she wanted to say a lot more. She glanced over at Lizzy who was still all chummy with Braden and shook her head. Taking a deep breath, her eyes went right back to her shoes. I didn’t have to be an empath to sense that she was angry. Even though I was just a few minutes away from sparring with Braden, I couldn’t manage to focus on that. I needed to patch things up with Lori as soon as possible.


    “You guys done?” Lizzy shouted at us, effectively axing any chance I had to talk to my leader. The room was empty, so the echo made it harder to hear her than if she’d just used her inside voice.


    “We’re done!” Lori yelled back, not quite as loud. That disappointed me and I wished she hadn’t even come over. Now my focus was going to be split two ways, and it was already messing with my head.


    Lori and Lizzy went to the far wall of the room, standing on the center line. The rest of the floor didn’t have designs to indicate where people should stand, just that one line running dead in the center, so Braden and I just backed away a reasonable distance. We were still waiting for Lizzy to signal for us to start when the area around us erupted into a series of two- and three-story buildings. I saw panels on the ground open to reveal the buildings. The entire thing was probably an engineering nightmare. Props to whoever made the whole thing happen.


    “Begin!” Lizzy yelled; her voice barely audible through the dying sounds of the shifting room.


    “How the hell do they manage this?” I asked, observing my surroundings. They were a mix of nondescript office-like buildings and homes. The buildings looked authentic, though they wouldn’t be mixed together that way in a real city. The actual layout of the buildings seemed random, with just enough room for maybe three people to walk next to each other through the “streets”. I was having trouble wrapping my head around how this sort of thing could even be built. “There has to be at least forty feet of space below this room to hold all these buildings.”


    Remembering the rules Lizzy laid out for this session—that the first person to incapacitate the other, land a hypothetical killing blow on the other, or got the other to surrender would win, with no lethal force being allowed—I slowly put a barrier around my body. It was taking longer than I’d wanted. With each second going by, I saw flickers of movement in the windows that I thought were Braden’s shadow warriors. It was the first full-body barrier I’d completed, and I found myself able to breathe just fine through it. That was cool. What wasn’t as cool was seeing everything through the purple-pink color of my Shimmer. I decided to call it Shimmer-Armor, apparently having no creative bones in my body. Somehow being able to breathe through it was enough of a win for me.


    At that moment, it was just a visual adjustment, which I felt like I could work around. My body still worked just fine. I had to create some segments at my elbows and knees to move in my armor. Being able to breathe through it was the most important thing. I didn’t have to risk leaving any part open for my mouth to get hit.


    I looked around for any buildings that might be taller than the others to use as a watchtower of sorts. Getting a vantage point seemed like as good a spot to start as any. Sadly, I didn’t see anything like that. None of the buildings were tall enough to let me so over the rest. Instead, I went inside the two-story home that popped up next to me. It was your standard cookie cutter home that you could find in any suburban neighborhood. Nothing special on the outside. I was more interested in what I could find inside. I opened the front door, and the room was dimly lit, something that made me pause. The only source of light came from a weak light bulb in the kitchen.


    Since a shadow only appeared when a light source was blocked, did that mean Braden had a theoretically infinite supply of power as long as there were shadows in the houses? Would it matter if the shadows were dim?


    I remembered Rebecca mentioning something like that when we watched him spar with Julio. There wasn’t really a chance for him to test it there, but with me standing in a building, ripe for the taking? Didn’t like it. Just because I’d only seen him pull from people or smaller objects didn’t mean he couldn’t also take from buildings. I strengthened my Shimmer-Barrier as best I could and saw it get a bit brighter in response. I didn’t know enough about his power, but I had to assume that any absence of light was a weapon that he could use.


    I took a quick glance around the living room of the home. It looked like a display room instead of a home that real people actually inhabited. Everything looked plasticky and would have benefited from showroom lighting. I ran into the kitchen and threw open every drawer, cabinet, or cooking appliance I could find. I was hoping to come across matches, a flashlight, or anything else I could use to create light. Just my luck, they were all empty. Maybe I should have just been grateful that the display objects opened and moved at all.


    I quickly generated a cube above my hand and rotated it around. It caught some of the light from the dull bulb above me, and there was a refraction effect, but it wasn’t strong enough. Maybe if I got it to catch from the bigger lights outside, I could use it to dispel some shadows. That was a gamble I didn’t want to take, so I put the idea away as something to break out if I had no other options. I dissipated the cube and sighed. “Should have paid more attention in my science classes.”


    I ran back out of the house without exploring the rest of it. If I was going to check any other buildings, I would only stay on the first floor. Jumping through a window was a much nicer prospect when I wasn’t ten feet or more above the ground. I was really wishing I knew more about Braden’s power or his way of thinking. He seemed shy, which told me nothing about how he liked to fight. Julio was confident enough that I assumed he’d just charge headfirst into anything, so that didn’t tell me much about how Braden liked to defend himself.


    My instinct was to stick to buildings as cover and move slowly through them. Most of those led through dark alleyways or under awnings, forcing the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end. At least in the middle of the street, the only shadow I had to worry about was my own. I did a double take to make sure I still had mine and it wasn’t looking suspicious. To my relief, it wasn’t acting odd at all. Maybe Braden could only pull shadows that he was near. Or maybe it was like a wireless signal that couldn’t travel through too many solid objects without difficulty.


    In my peripheral vision, I kept seeing flickers and blurs going around in the buildings. I was really starting to hate that, out of every possible opponent, Lizzy wanted me to fight the shadow guy. With how many hallucinations the gunman who killed my parents gave me, I still had some trouble fully shaking the idea they could be gone. My thoughts randomly going to Lori didn’t help me discern between reality and my hallucinations either. With how active my brain was being, I was not eager to find out if they really were hallucinations or his shadows.


    I carefully walked the street, listening for any sound. My head kept screaming at me that it wasn’t that big of an area, but the buildings blocked the windows for the spectator area and both team leaders, so it felt like I was just dumped into an abandoned section of a city. It felt like it was a lot bigger than I knew it really was. The entire thing was silent, and it was starting to creep me out.


    Just then, I felt pressure on my right ankle. I spun my head around and saw a thin, black blade coming out of my shadow. It was stopped by my barrier, but it was still strong enough to push the thin Shimmer against my skin. I generated a spear and launched it at the shadow, making it fall back into the ground where it belonged. If I didn’t have the full-body shield, that might’ve severed my Achilles. It was disappointing that my Shimmer-Armor was so malleable by something other than myself.


    I silently cursed my power for the match-up I was in, desperately wishing I could do something like fly. I could have tried to create a Shimmer-Shield under my feet and moved that around, or even tried to lift my entire body from within the barrier I made around myself, but knowing my luck, I would have squished myself into jelly or launched myself into the ceiling at supersonic speeds. Those were things to be practiced in a more controlled environment.


    I watched my own shadow for a few seconds to make sure it wasn’t going to strike out again. I wasn’t sure if Braden could see me from a hiding place or through his shadows, and I didn’t know if he could feel a sensation through them like I could with my Shimmer. It didn’t look like he could when I watched him fight Julio. Then again, he didn’t use his little shadow blade trick on him either. There was a lot I didn’t from that little sparring session, but there was no way for him to know all my secrets either. Hell, I barely knew my secrets.


    I kept walking forward, picking up my pace, trying to leave my feet on the ground as little as possible. I had to ignore every flicker of movement I saw, since I didn’t have the luxury to stop and examine each one. My only goal was to run around and try to find Braden or lure him out into attacking me. If he attacked me with his shadow warriors, though, I didn’t know what to do after that.


    One step at a time, one step at a time.


    I rounded a corner and nearly impaled myself on the shadow warrior that had been waiting for me. Even though I managed to avoid gutting myself on it, when I hopped back in reflex, it slashed out low. This time, the slash was stronger than the little jab aimed at my ankle. It tore through my Shimmer-Armor with moderate resistance and left a cut on my left thigh. I put my hand over it by reflex and it came back slick with blood and the weird shadow goop that Braden’s power created.


    Wincing and sucking air through my teeth, I repaired the damage in my Shimmer-Armor and tried to ignore the pain. The repair worked nicely. I trusted the armor saved me from worse damage on my leg, or maybe even losing it entirely, so I had no intentions of ditching it. The shadow warrior shambled toward me, my blood mixing in with the black blade it held. What I would have given to be a scientist able to collect a sample of it to study.


    I created a Shimmer-Spear and sent it toward the shadow. The stinging pain in my leg made it harder for my brain to focus, so instead of going into its head like I’d wanted, it embedded itself deep in the shadow’s chest. It made a strange sound on impact, like dropping a soaking wet shirt on a tile floor. So, they really weren’t just shadows, not that I needed much more to confirm that with my wounded leg. It was a tangible object with its own properties. I didn’t need much convincing after everything I’d seen, but interacting with it using my own Anomaly helped solidify my guess. It would have been much cooler had I not been dealing with the burning in my left leg. Whatever it did, the slash from that was infinitely worse than anything from Eric. It made the cuts left by his knife feel like cat scratches.


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    While keeping an eye on the shadow warrior and trying to avoid any possible traps, I kept wondering why that cut felt worse than the deep slashes I got from Eric. Was it just the adrenaline from that fight that kept it from hurting as much? Maybe the desire to protect Megan and Rebecca? Since this fight with Braden was still only a sparring match, I didn’t quite feel the same urgency I had with Eric. I allowed myself a moment to try and think about the shadow’s composition. That didn’t yield me a lot of useful info for the fight.


    Regaining some focus, I created and launched another spear toward the shadow. This time, it went right into its brain, or whatever was supposed to be there. If it had looked anything like a human, I absolutely would have hesitated on doing that, so it saved my bacon that those things were so creepy and twitchy. Watching it dissolve into a black puddle bought me a moment of rest to catch my breath. My spear clattered against the ground, and I broke that down with just a glance. I didn’t like seeing the black goop on it at all.


    It raced off down the street that it originally blocked me from going down. It hit me that I saw this happen when Braden fought Julio. The shadow was destroyed, and the puddle took off back to Braden.


    “Come on, come on,” I mumbled, trying to get my left leg to work properly. It wasn’t a dramatic chase as much me just hobbling after a moving puddle, but that was just about the only way I had to find Braden before he could incapacitate me or land a killing blow.