Sam’s proposal hit me like a sudden squall in the middle of a clear day. I froze for a second, trying to process what I had just heard, but I still could not find a shred of logic in what he was suggesting.
“Sam, why d’you even want this?” I finally asked directly, looking him straight in the eyes.
“I’m surprised you’re asking,” he said, giving my shoulder a friendly pat while the other cadets ahead of us kept making their hopeless attempts to climb the invisible staircase. “You and I are cut from the same cloth, Tom.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I frowned, sensing a catch in the words of this eternally optimistic guy. “You mean ’cause we’re both way past school age?”
“Well, that too. By the way, I’m only a couple years older than you,” Sam said with a wide grin, and the sunlight made his bald head shine even brighter. “Unlike these kids, I still remember the day the whole country went crazy over Barack Obama getting elected president. Felt like the entire nation lost its mind.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that,” I said with an involuntary smile, giving in to a mild wave of nostalgia. “After the results got announced, my neighbor was so shocked he seriously packed his stuff and moved to Canada.”
“Man, people talked so much back then about how the country would become unrecognizable after Obama, and in the end... basically everything stayed the same,” Sam sighed with a touch of bittersweet sadness. “But I’m not talking about our age or politics right now.”
“Then what’re you talking about?”
“We’re both masters, Tom. People who reached the ceiling of martial arts and barely have any worthy opponents left,” he said, and his voice suddenly carried those unmistakable notes of Eastern fatalism. “Don’t you feel it? Once you reached the top, you locked yourself inside a cage. There’s nobody left to share that wild thrill of battle with, when the person standing across from you is your equal. When everything comes down to a single millimeter, a single second, one wrong move. When you’re standing on the edge.”
I listened to him and realized we were on completely different wavelengths. I had never shared that warrior’s path philosophy. I hated fighting. Even when I pinned my own senseis to the mat or neutralized that thug in prison, I never felt a drop of excitement or pleasure. To me, it had always been just work. Dirty, necessary work that had to be done as efficiently and quickly as possible, not savored like some kind of experience.
I decided not to get dragged into philosophical debates and simply stayed silent, staring somewhere toward the horizon where the rooftops of the administrative blocks peeked through the trees.
“I can see it in your eyes, you understand me,” Sam concluded confidently, clearly taking my silence as agreement.
“Sam, if you’re that desperate for a fight, why not just find some elite karate guy? Turn off S-Power for both of you, and you’ll be on equal footing.”
“That’s not it, Tom,” he said with a disappointed shake of his head. “Not trying to brag, but I’m probably the only person on the entire continent who’s truly reached the absolute limit of mastering pure S-Power control.”
He slowly raised his index finger. At the very tip, like a tiny round chambered inside a barrel, a bright point of compressed energy appeared. A moment later, it shot into the sky. I followed it with my eyes and saw it literally slice through a fluffy cloud high above, leaving behind a perfectly clean hole.
Well, that was genuinely impressive. No S-Gun could achieve that kind of surgical precision or create such tiny yet concentrated projectiles. From a practical standpoint, it actually seemed far more useful.
“With your skills, Tom, you’ll master armor control in record time. You’ll be able to move in sync with me,” Sam continued, trying to provoke my competitive side.
“I doubt it. Up there in the sky, you moved faster and smoother than our sergeant in full gear.”
“You’re more talented than the sergeant,” he shot back instantly. “Besides, the rules’ll be fair: you use all your unique superpowers and the armor’s capabilities, while I only use pure energy. Trust me, it’ll be the best sparring match of your life.”
“We’ll see how it goes,” I muttered vaguely.
But Sam looked like I had already signed a contract in blood. He was practically glowing with happiness.
The session finally came to an end. On the way back to the barracks, none of the guys even hinted at the conversation the master and I had spent so long whispering about. As always, teenagers could not care less about two old-timers talking.
***
Over the next few days, life in the camp gradually turned into a steady routine. Like people say: a new school only feels scary during the first week, until you learn where the bathroom is and where the cafeteria is. In the awakened camp, thanks to its compact size, the adaptation process took maybe a couple of days at most.
The mornings started with mandatory classes repeated with metronomic regularity.
First came physical training with the sergeant. My advice about stopping the mindless one-size-fits-all exercises and actually training the boys intelligently was still collecting dust on the shelf. Apparently, Selina was still letting the issue marinate somewhere in the upper offices while waiting for approval from above.
Second came armor piloting training. Unlike that first day, when they tried to show us everything at once, we were now methodically breaking down each mode separately. We started with the Altitude mode. It turned out there was nothing supernatural about it: the main thing was catching the rhythm between pressing the button and lifting your leg. After an hour, it started to resemble a monotonous dance.
The mandatory hours were interrupted by standalone lectures. For example, there was a long lecture about firearm safety rules and the legal aspects of using firearms. I was exempt from that one.
And of course, the main attraction was Professor Langstrom’s daily lectures. Those could not be called routine no matter how hard I tried. Every topic was new, strange, and unsettling.
“Good morning, cadets,” Selina greeted us as she entered the classroom. “We’ve finished the introductory section on portal physics and the fundamentals of S-Power. From this point onward, all our lessons’ll focus on those waiting for us on the other side. Our enemies.”
Without wasting time on long introductions, she clicked the remote. The projector hummed, and an image of a creature flashed onto the board, sending a chill down my spine. It was a tall humanoid with sickly green skin. It had no recognizable facial features: no nose, no eyes, no mouth. Its skull was completely smooth and hairless. It had no sexual characteristics and looked as though it had been molded from some bizarre bioplastic. But the most horrifying detail was the head. Or rather, the place where the face should have been. There was a deep black indentation there, shaped like the cone of a powerful speaker.
“These creatures’re representatives of an alien species with extremely advanced intelligence. We classify them as Loz’an,” Selina explained in an even tone. “They started appearing in portals in large numbers around five years ago. During that time, the Corps managed to gather enough data on their physiology, culture, and most importantly, their technology. Now open your notebooks. Draw them schematically. It’ll help your brains fix the enemy’s image at a subconscious level.”
I picked up a pen and tried sketching the thing in my notebook. Honestly, it came out terrible. It looked like some skinny cucumber with a hole instead of a head. Looking at my drawing, I thought that maybe after graduating from camp I should finally improve my artistic skills.
“The Loz’an have officially been placed on the Green List,” Selina began, pacing in front of the board. “At present, they no longer pose a critical threat to humanity. Throughout my course, we’ll move progressively from species we’ve thoroughly studied to those we know almost nothing about. Now then, Loz’an biology. Start taking notes.”
She gave the remote a quick click, and a video started playing on the board, one clearly not meant for the faint of heart. It was footage of an autopsy inside one of the Corps’ sterile laboratories. Strapped to a metal operating table flooded with harsh white light lay the green humanoid. A group of surgeons in full protective suits methodically dug through its insides. Ted and Louisa instantly turned pale green themselves and grimaced in perfect sync, looking away. The rest of us, myself included, leaned forward with undisguised, almost predatory curiosity.
Among the doctors in the footage, I immediately noticed a familiar silhouette. Even beneath the medical cap and mask, the tuft of blonde hair sticking out gave Selina away. She had already been right in the middle of everything back then.
“As you can see in this footage,” Selina said, pointing at the screen just as the surgeons began stretching the alien’s limb with incredible force, and to my astonishment it elongated a good ten yards, “the Loz’an completely lack bones. There’s no skeleton in the way we understand it. The structural integrity of their bodies is maintained by their skin, which’s incredibly dense and resembles high-grade reinforced rubber in its properties. And most interestingly, they can manipulate that density at will.”
Another click of the remote replaced the bloody operating room with smooth 3D animation. The Loz’an model extended a limb that looked more like a thick sausage toward some kind of mechanism. Right before our eyes, ten thin flexible tendrils shot out from the stump and wrapped themselves around the tool with surgical precision. Then the animation showed the rubbery creature literally squeezing itself into a narrow maintenance pipe and slithering through it like a giant slime until it emerged inside a residential building.
“Because of such radical anatomical differences, their architecture and tools look like something out of surrealism to us,” Selina explained, adjusting her glasses. “Without specialized exo-equipment, a human physically can’t fully operate their technology. We’re too rigid for their world.”
The autopsy footage resumed. The scientists carefully extracted a long intertwined bundle of fibers running through the alien’s entire torso. It looked like a cluster of fiber-optic cables drenched in slime.
“And this’s the crown jewel of Loz’an evolution, their unique digestive system,” Selina said, and professional fascination crept into her voice. “They feed through the pores of their skin. Watch closely.”
The next clip had been filmed on a shaky handheld camera somewhere deep inside a portal. The lens constantly caught branches and leaves, creating a complete sense of immersion. In the footage, a real Loz’an, completely unaware it was being observed, tore a fat pulsating larva off the bark of an alien tree. It didn’t eat it. Instead, it placed the thing onto the palm of its left hand and crushed it with the right, methodically rubbing the resulting gray paste into its skin as though it were moisturizing cream. The image switched to graphics that clearly demonstrated how the nutrients were instantly absorbed into the dermis and distributed throughout the body.
When the operating room appeared on the screen again, the scientists began draining liters of thick gray liquid from the alien’s body into galvanized buckets.
“Before you’s the Loz’an brain,” Selina said, tapping the board with her pointer. “It’s liquid. Essentially, their consciousness circulates throughout the body together with the lymphatic fluid. So, ladies and gentlemen, remember this once and for all: trying to kill a Loz’an with a headshot’s a complete waste of ammunition. The upper appendage isn’t a critical node. Write that down, it’ll absolutely appear on your exams.”
Meanwhile, the surgeons in the footage dissected the speaker-like structure on top of the creature’s head, extracting strange organs coated in thick slime.
“That’s their vocal apparatus. They communicate through a complex system of acoustic vibrations and bass frequencies. The human larynx can reproduce only about five percent of those sounds.”
A new expedition clip showed two aliens having a conversation. Their speech sounded like a deep vibrating hum reminiscent of powerful nightclub subwoofers. If someone closed their eyes, they could probably start tapping their foot to the rhythm.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Nick said, raising his hand and looking slightly stunned. “Do we actually understand what they’re saying? Do we have translators?”
“Only partially,” Selina answered after a brief pause. “Considering their plasticity and organ structure, it’s far easier for the Loz’an to learn English and imitate our sounds than for us to reproduce those low-frequency vibrations. Now let’s move on to the most intriguing section: reproduction.”
In the footage, the surgeons extracted several leathery sacs from deep inside the alien’s body. The 3D model displayed two individuals, a conditional male and female. The process looked both absurdly mundane and completely wild: the male simply secreted a portion of yellowish fluid onto his palm and high-fived the female, rubbing the substance into her skin. The X-ray diagram showed the alien cells penetrating through the pores, migrating through the body, and settling inside a specialized incubation sac. After some time, the embryo became dense and bright green, and the female simply expelled it through widened pores. A new Loz’an was ready.
The autopsy continued. Selina commented on every detail: the network of ultra-thin capillaries directly beneath the skin for oxygen absorption, the strange organ resembling a dense translucent apple hidden inside the chest cavity, the very organ that allowed them to perceive the world through heat and sound waves instead of eyes. The lecture, reinforced with vivid details of alien dissection, stretched on for a solid hour and a half.
“Looks like I got a little carried away with physiology,” Selina said, briefly glancing at her smartphone. Only a couple of minutes remained before the alarm rang. “Questions? Keep ’em short and relevant.”
“I’ve got one!” Ted practically jumped out of his seat, nearly knocking over his chair. “Main question, professor: what’s the best way to waste these rubber freaks?”
“Cadet Drake, with enthusiasm like that, you’ll become a true hero,” she replied, with irony as thin and sharp as a blade slipping into her voice. “Because of their structure, the Loz’an are completely immune to blunt weapons, clubs, and even bullets. Projectiles either get stuck or ricochet off them. Cutting attacks’re also largely ineffective: their skin’s too durable, and wounds seal almost instantly. Field tests’ve confirmed only two reliable methods. Concentrated acid or high-powered lasers. They literally vaporize their molecular bonds.”
“Lasers? We’re actually gonna get to shoot lasers?!” Ted’s eyes lit up with fanatical excitement.
“If you’re deployed into a Loz’an portal, that’ll be part of your standard equipment,” Selina said, turning off the projector and silencing the alarm. “That’s all for today. Tomorrow’s lecture’ll focus on their culture and technology. Dismissed.”
As I walked out of the classroom, I caught myself holding my head high, with some strange excitement boiling inside my chest. This was fascinating as hell. Fascinating enough for my mother’s words to resurface in my mind. She had always wanted me to go into medicine, always insisted I would make an excellent surgeon. Who knew. Maybe she had been right.