Chapter 38. Weapons of the Awakened
We were led out of the stuffy classroom into the open air. The sun blazed over the parade ground, and a faint shimmer rose from the heated concrete. On the lawn, bright green beyond the obstacle course, an entire demonstration had already been set up. The first thing that caught my eye was a row of massive concrete blocks, gray, chipped cubes nearly as tall as a person.
Next to them stood the female squad sergeant. She was frozen in her perfect uniform with her hands clasped behind her back, but my attention immediately shifted to her thigh. A holster with a pistol hung from her wide tactical belt. Thanks to Mr. Parker from Taran, at that shooting club they drilled safety procedures and gear protocols into me so often that I had developed a professional twitch. My eye automatically picked out any irregularity in equipment: an extra strap on a tactical garter, the angle of a holster, the position of a safety. To an ordinary person she was just a girl with a gun, to me she was an armed asset ready for war.
A heavy wooden crate stood beside her, reaching up to her waist. A solid piece, smelling of pine.
“Platoon, form two ranks, move!” our sergeant barked, stepping into position beside his colleague.
A brief commotion followed. This was our first time mixing boys and girls into a single formation. Some hesitated, some did not immediately understand where to stand, so it took a few seconds longer than regulations allowed to form a straight line. The sergeant pressed his lips together in irritation but said nothing.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Professor Langstrom. Selina had no intention of standing in the heat with us. She had brought a folding chair from the classroom, stepped off to the side into the shade, and with distinctly feminine grace lowered herself onto it. She leaned back, elegantly crossed her legs, and froze there, watching us with the air of a queen inspecting her guards.
“Attention! The topic of today’s lesson is the operation of specialized military equipment of the Awakened Corps,” the sergeant’s voice rang across the ground, each word sharp and precise. “I will conduct the main portion. Professor Langstrom, as the lead developer of this equipment, will supervise the process and provide technical explanations. Any questions?”
“No, sir!” we shouted in unison. Almost.
“Professor Langstrom, permission to speak!” Ted stepped forward before the sergeant could begin. Loud, bold, ignoring half the formalities. “The tech’s cool and all, ma’am, but didn’t you promise us superpower training today? That’s kinda why we’re here.”
Selina slowly turned her head toward him. A faint, almost feline smile played on her lips.
“We’ll get to superpowers today as well, cadet, don’t worry,” she purred. “I assure you, once you understand the operating principles of S-Power-based equipment, Master Smith’s techniques will come to you smoothly. Sergeant, proceed.”
“Yes, ma’am!” The sergeant stepped toward the wooden crate. “This contains a full set of standard-issue gear for a soldier of the Awakened Corps. A training unit. This particular set is fitted to my measurements. Later, each of you will receive an individual set tailored to your own specifications.”
Together with the second sergeant, he began unpacking the crate, on the side of which a bold black stencil read: PROPERTY OF US ARMY.
The sergeant started laying out the contents. At first, the items were fairly ordinary: heavy fabric camouflage pants, a jacket, a scatter of pouches, a matte helmet. Everything was worn, with cracks and stains from frequent use. But then he brought out something monumental.
It was a massive body armor unit, more like an exoskeletal harness. Two heavy chrome cylinders were mounted on the back, with thick reinforced cables running from them to the boots and gloves. Topping it all was a strange device the sergeant attached to his thigh, something between an oversized pistol and the nozzle of a fueling hose with a grip.
“Before you is the tactical armor of the Awakened,” Selina rose from her chair and walked along the formation while the sergeant pulled the structure onto himself. “Cadets, tell me: what have people wanted most since the day the first awakened appeared in the world?”
“To become one of them,” Mary’s sharp, icy voice cut in.
It seemed those were her first words all day. She stood at attention, staring straight ahead, her tone carrying a strange mix of superiority and boredom.
“Absolutely correct, Cadet Summers,” Selina nodded, pleased with the answer. “Some people spend their entire lives doing nothing, skipping school, wasting time on social media, and then nature simply grants them the power of a god.”
I felt a wave of discomfort ripple through the ranks. Ted, Nick, Louisa all looked away for a moment. They were exactly those lucky ones who had drawn a golden ticket in the genetic lottery. And honestly, I was not far from them myself. As for Mary, it was unclear. She stood motionless like a rock.
“And others,” Selina paused, her voice growing sharper, “push themselves from early childhood, train relentlessly, memorize textbooks, perfect their bodies, yet nature passes them by. For decades, the greatest minds have tried to correct this blatant injustice. And only I have succeeded.”
She radiated self-satisfaction. Every gesture, every turn of her head carried overwhelming vanity. I watched her and understood one thing clearly: this woman was in love with her own intellect. I was not sure that was a bad quality for a scientist, but in the military such people always played their own game.
“I cannot rewrite the human code and give the spark. But I can give everyone controlled access to S-Power,” she declared triumphantly, pointing at the cylinders on the sergeant’s back. “Inside each reservoir there are exactly one thousand units of pure resource. To fill them, we use highly advanced compressors of my own design, which literally extract S-Power particles from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we are not in a laboratory, so use your imagination and picture how it works.”
“Professor Langstrom,” Mary spoke again, voicing the question that had been on my mind. “What reward did the government assign for such a discovery?”
“Oh, the Awakened Corps knows how to reward its heroes,” Selina purred. “The rank of major, a ten million dollar check, and unlimited grants for any further research. That is only a small part.”
A muffled whisper spread behind me. Ten million... For these teenagers, those were numbers from another world. The money caught my attention too. With that kind of sum, one could buy a cozy uninhabited island somewhere in the Caribbean and forget everything. But what stung the most was the rank.
I felt genuinely envious, and even a little ashamed. Selina was my age, give or take a couple of years, and she was already a major. And me? Just a Staff Sergeant. Not exactly impressive. In the hierarchy, that gap felt like the distance between a corporation owner and a senior mid-level manager.
“So, cadets,” Selina added, noticing our reaction. “I suggest you not only sweat on the obstacle course but also listen carefully to my lectures. The United States Army values not only muscles and reflexes. Intelligence is the real weapon.”
Ted snorted demonstratively, clearly unwilling to accept that a textbook could matter more than bicep size. I did not blame him. After what we had seen in those recordings, where alien filth tore our guys apart, I was leaning toward the idea that in a portal I would need speed and accuracy far more than knowledge of quadratic equations. But looking at the heavy armor that could make an ordinary person equal to gods, I understood that the rules of the game had just changed.
The gearing-up process was complete. In that equipment, the sergeant looked... peculiar. If the Navy SEALs had decided to cross assault armor with a deep-sea diving suit, the result would have looked something like this. Bulky, futuristic, and dangerously lethal.
“Platoon, eyes on me!” he barked, raising his hands.
He showed us his palms in thick tactical gloves. On the outer side, right on the index fingers, barely noticeable black protrusions could be seen, small raised buttons. If you did not know where to look, you would take them for standard reinforcement elements.
“This system’s got four primary modes: Defense, Attack, Dash, and Elevation,” the sergeant said, his voice sharp and rhythmic. “Each activation cycle burns S-Power from the tanks. Let’s start simple. Defense.”
He pressed one of the buttons with a short, precise motion. The air around his massive figure changed instantly. It did not look like force fields from Star Wars, more like dense heat haze shimmering above a burning highway somewhere in Arizona. A thin, barely visible film of distorted space wrapped around him from head to toe.
The female squad sergeant did not waste time on words. She smoothly drew her standard-issue Beretta from her hip holster. She moved like a professional killer: perfect stance, flawless grip. Five dull, snapping shots into the sergeant’s abdomen. The distance was considerable, the shell casings scattered across the grass with metallic chimes, not reaching our formation, but the sound struck hard in the silence of the ground.
Someone behind me yelped, and the formation instinctively shifted back. Even Selina, sitting off to the side, winced at the sharp smell of gunpowder. Only Mary and I remained still. We were like purebred dogs trained to the thunder of firing ranges. I kept my eyes locked on the barrier.
Each bullet behaved unnaturally upon contact with the haze. The lead core did not simply stop, it flattened instantly, losing all kinetic energy in a fraction of a second, then dropped helplessly at the sergeant’s feet. However, I noticed an important detail: with each impact, the transparent field flared slightly brighter for a split second, like a system flicker. Energy was being drained.
“That’s a defensive perimeter made of condensed S-Power,” Selina’s voice sounded casual as she examined her flawless nails. “In theory, it’ll take an M67 grenade going off right at your feet. But everything’s got a limit. A direct hit from an ATGM or a tank round will just collapse the field along with the user. And remember the cost: ten units per second.”
“Remember this once and for all: there’s no such thing as immortality,” the sergeant added, deactivating the field. The haze vanished. “I’ll teach you to trigger the shield milliseconds before impact. Efficiency’s life. Now, onto the next modes.”
He pulled out that same strange device from his thigh holster, something like a hybrid between a pistol and a fuel nozzle. S-Gun was written on the grip.
“Attack mode. In the worlds you’re going to, standard 5.56 is a joke. You won’t be hauling a Javelin through alien jungles. So this is your primary weapon.”
The sergeant raised the S-Gun toward a distant concrete block. There was no shot. No bang, no muzzle flash, no recoil. The silence was unsettling, as if the weapon had simply clicked empty. But a second later, the half-ton concrete cube simply ceased to exist. It disintegrated into fine debris, throwing a cloud of gray dust into the air.
Inside me, everything lit up with excitement. As someone who had spent time at shooting ranges and playing paintball, I was in a state close to euphoria. No suppressor in the world could ever produce that level of sterile silence. It was a perfect elimination tool.
“The projectile’s formed from a condensed energy cluster,” Selina explained, clearly enjoying our shock. “It’s invisible until it meets resistance. Cost’s ten units per click.”
“No cowboy-style shooting,” the sergeant cut in, lowering the weapon. “Every shot’s gotta have a purpose. Now, Dash.”
He lowered his stance slightly, shifting his center of gravity like a sprinter before a hundred-meter start. He pressed another button on the glove and the world blurred. In an instant, he was three hundred yards away, at the far end of the field. The speed was insane. Even a Lamborghini at full throttle would not achieve that kind of acceleration from a standstill. Another ten units gone.
“And finally,” the sergeant said after returning the same way, “Elevation.”
He lifted his leg as if stepping over an invisible threshold. Click, and his boot planted firmly on empty air. He shifted his weight, lifted the other foot, and began walking upward, stepping into the sky on invisible stairs. It looked surreal: a heavily armored man climbing a transparent staircase created by his own gear. After reaching about twenty yards, he calmly walked back down.
“Creation of temporary high-density platforms,” Selina stood up from her chair. “Energy cost’s the same as the shield. Ten units per second while you stand on the field or create a new step.”
I quickly calculated: one thousand units per tank. In an active fight, with the shield up, a couple of shots, and a dash, the entire reserve would be gone in minutes. This was not god armor, it was a precision instrument.
“That was a demonstration for beginners,” the sergeant was back in front of the formation. His gaze hardened. “Now watch what I’ll expect from you during qualification.”
What followed could only be described as a lethal ballet. The sergeant shot upward on air steps, fired a series of silent charges midair at the remaining blocks, turning them into rubble. While airborne, he activated Dash, shifting sideways from an imaginary attack, landed on an invisible platform, and fired again. As he began descending, the female sergeant opened fire again with the Beretta, but he simply walked through the bullets, ignoring them until her magazine ran dry.
He stopped in front of us. Not a drop of sweat, no heavy breathing. Just a machine.
The teenagers stood with their mouths open, unable to say a word. Army parkour on steroids, that was the only way to describe it.
“Your ability to operate this gear is your main ticket out of this camp,” the sergeant swept us with a heavy gaze. “If you don’t pass the S-Power efficiency standard, you’ll stay in training until you do. This isn’t college where they curve grades for ratings. Your survival’s on the line.”
I felt tension spreading through the formation, mixed with excitement. Everyone wanted to get their hands on those controls. My fingers tightened unconsciously, mimicking the press. I wanted that S-Gun. I wanted to feel that power.
“Today you’ll get a chance to test the gear under my personal supervision,” the sergeant suddenly looked straight at me. “Staff Sergeant Ross, step forward!”
My heart skipped a beat, then started pounding twice as hard. It seemed the time for theory was over. It was time to truly enter the game.