My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

The group has actually been waiting to test out their exosuit flight ability. Though they were aware that things would be a bit difficult for them, as it’s literally their first time to fly.

But even being aware of the difficulty in front of them didn’t stop them. This was why when Liam told them to follow him out the shaft, they stood up and did their best to fly. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

The shaft, for them, was the first challenge.

It looked straightforward enough from below. A vertical column of open air, wide enough for several people side by side, running straight up through the building’s core and opening to the Dimensional Space sky far above. Liam rose through it without effort, his body lifting with the ease of someone stepping onto an escalator.

His friends watched him go, then looked at each other.

"How hard can it be?," Matt asked, it wasn’t really a question.

He bent his knees slightly, like he was preparing to jump, and then willed himself upward.

He went sideways and his shoulder clipped the shaft wall. He spun once before grabbing the edge of a support beam to stop himself. He hung there for a moment, horizontal, his legs drifting.

"Okay," he said. "Harder than it looks."

Stacy tried next. She rose about two meters, perfectly vertical, and then slowly began rotating like a bottle floating in water. Her arms came out instinctively, which made it worse. She drifted into the wall, pushed off it gently, drifted into the opposite wall, and pushed off that one too.

"I’m a pinball," she announced.

Alex had watched both attempts carefully before trying. He rose smoothly at first, which prompted a quiet noise of satisfaction from him, and then overcorrected his angle and went diagonal at speed, nearly colliding with Matt, who was still figuring out how to get horizontal again.

Lana went up in a slow, cautious spiral that looked accidental but turned out to be effective. She emerged from the shaft rotating gently and looking deeply annoyed about it.

Elise simply shot straight up with too much force, disappeared through the opening at the top at considerable speed, and then reappeared seconds later descending slowly with the careful expression of someone who had just made a decision they regretted.

Harper got three meters up and stopped. He hovered there, completely still, arms out, refusing to move until he understood the mechanics. He stayed like that for almost twenty seconds. Then he rose the remaining distance in a smooth, controlled line and said nothing when he emerged.

Kristy went up filming herself, which meant she wasn’t concentrating, which meant she rotated the entire way up and emerged upside down. She righted herself, reviewed the footage, and looked satisfied with both outcomes.

Kristopher was last. He watched everyone else, took exactly one breath, and rose through the shaft in a clean vertical line. He emerged at the top, adjusted his angle with a small tilt of his shoulders, and settled into a stable hover beside Harper. He looked completely unbothered.

Matt, who had finally made it through via a combination of wall-pushing and willpower, stared at him. "How."

"I watched what everyone did wrong," Kristopher said.

"That’s so annoying," Matt said.

Above the building, the Dimensional Space opened up around them fully, and for a moment the residual chaos of the shaft was forgotten.

The sky was a deep violet, darker at the edges than the center, and it stretched in every direction without interruption. The red landscape below was vast and still, the cracked earth catching no light and giving none back. The industrial base rose beneath them, massive and dark, its scale finally comprehensible from above in a way it hadn’t been from the ground.

They hung in the air in a loose cluster. All of them were still for a moment, as the physical comedy of the last few minutes faded.

They were flying. Actually flying. Not in a machine, not strapped into a chair. They were standing in open air above an alien landscape inside a space that existed outside their universe and they were doing it under their own power.

Matt looked down at his feet, then at the ground far below, then at the horizon.

"Okay," he said quietly. "This is the best thing that has ever happened to me."

Nobody argued with that, as it’s the same for all of them. With the exception of Liam, of course.

Liam hovered a few meters ahead of the group, watching their faces cycle through the same sequence, and he let them have the moment.

Then he said, "Do your best to stay close to me."

And without waiting, he moved, accelerating smoothly away from the group in a long, low arc over the red terrain. The his speed hit faster and the shockwave followed, rolling outward from his trajectory like a thunderclap, hitting the group in a warm wall of sparsely displaced air that rocked them in their hovers.

They felt it in their chests.

Matt’s eyes tracked the line Liam had cut across the sky. A grin spread across his face, slow and enormous.

He looked at the others and he saw that they were already looking back at him.

Nobody said anything, but the same thought crossed eight faces at the same time.

Matt moved first, shooting forward with everything the suit had, and immediately began tumbling. His arms spun out, his legs crossed, and he made a genuinely undignified series of corrections before finding his line and pulling out of the tumble into something that was technically forward movement.

It wasn’t graceful. But it was fast.

Alex went next, angled wrong from the start but compensating mid-flight with the precise, rapid adjustments of someone treating flight like a calculation problem. He wobbled twice, solved both wobbles, and then leveled into a clean cruise with the focused expression of a man who had refused to let physics beat him.

Stacy launched herself forward with more confidence than control, hit a spin at the top of her arc, and pulled out of it laughing. The laugh kept coming as she leveled, carrying across the open space.

Lana found her speed methodically, building from a hover to a glide to a full sprint over the course of several seconds, her line clean and her face set with quiet concentration.

Elise went fast immediately. Whatever hesitation had defined her ascent through the shaft was gone. She cut forward at full speed, made one sharp correction, and then she was simply flying, her form the cleanest of anyone’s after Kristopher.

Harper flew with the same patience he’d shown in the shaft. He built his speed in deliberate increments, testing each threshold before adding more, until he was cruising at pace with a controlled ease that looked almost effortless.

Kristy filmed for approximately four seconds before the speed got to her and she tucked the phone away and just flew, which was the right call.

Kristopher flew the way he did everything. Like he’d been doing it for years and was simply choosing to do it again now.

Within two minutes, all eight of them were in the air and moving and the struggling was behind them. What replaced it was pure, unqualified velocity.

They chased Liam across the Dimensional Space.

He wasn’t holding back, not fully, but he wasn’t leaving them either, maintaining a speed that was just ahead of their fastest, pulling them forward. The red terrain blurred beneath them. The violet sky pressed down from above. The wind resistance the suits managed meant they felt the speed without the drag, just the sensation of real, sustained flight.

Matt pulled alongside Alex and said something that got lost in the rush of air and the suit’s external sound dampening. Alex looked at him, understood none of it, and pointed forward. Matt pointed back at himself, then at Liam, then made a gesture that clearly meant he was going to try to race him.

Alex pointed at Matt and then pointed straight down, which clearly meant he thought that was a terrible idea.

Matt went anyway.

He pushed the suit to its maximum and closed the gap briefly, pulling almost level with Liam before the speed became too much and he started oscillating, riding the edge of control in a way that was either very skilled or very lucky.

Probably lucky.

Liam glanced sideways at him and smiled.

Matt saw the smile, interpreted it correctly as a challenge, and pushed harder.

He lasted four more seconds before the oscillation won and he spun out into a long, helpless spiral that took him fifty meters below the group’s altitude before he pulled out of it, leveled, and rejoined the formation with an expression of complete dignity, as though the spin had been intentional.

Nobody said anything but they were all smiling too hard.

They crossed the Dimensional Space in wide arcs and long straight sprints, doubling back and crossing each other’s paths. Stacy and Elise found speed together, flying close and matching each other’s angles. Harper and Kristopher fell into a quiet, parallel cruise at the edge of the group. Lana flew alone but neartge group, her line always clean.

At one point, Liam came to a dead stop in mid-air and watched them pass. He saw Kristy flying upside down for reasons that were unclear and apparently intentional. He saw Matt attempting a maneuver that had no name and probably shouldn’t. He saw Alex flying with his arms folded, as if removing them from the equation had improved his aerodynamics, which somehow it had.

He watched all of it, this group of people he’d come to know, care about and trust, flying and laughing at each other across the open sky.

A warm feeling settled in his chest. It was the same loosening from earlier, but it was fuller now.

He smiled and shot after them.