My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Hearing Liam call for the next person, they all turned to each other and stepped back at the same time.

The movement was perfectly synchronized, as though they’d choreographed it—eight people all deciding simultaneously that maybe someone else should volunteer first.

The vast expanse of Antarctic ice around them suddenly felt very small, and the fact that their exosuits could theoretically protect them from anything short of a direct nuclear blast provided surprisingly little comfort.

Alex broke the silence with the question everyone was thinking. "Are you going to throw us like you did with Matt?"

His voice carried a careful neutrality through the suit’s communication system, and it had the kind of tone someone used when they were trying very hard not to sound accusatory while asking if they were about to be launched across a frozen wasteland.

Liam’s expression was genuinely reassuring. "Not likely. And you don’t have to worry—Matt didn’t feel any pain."

All eyes turned to Matt, who was still seated on the frozen ground where he’d crashed, apparently in no particular hurry to stand up. He raised a thumb in confirmation, his helmet reflecting the pale Antarctic sunlight.

"See?" Liam gestured at Matt. "Completely fine."

Harper’s voice came through next, skepticism evident. "Okay, while that might be true, it still doesn’t stop us from thinking about it. Like, intellectually we understand the suits protect us. But watching Matt get thrown like a ragdoll kind of overrides the intellectual understanding with the much more primitive ’that looks like it hurt’ reaction."

The others murmured agreement. Knowing you were safe and feeling safe were apparently very different things when faced with someone who could casually redirect several hundred pounds of armored human like they were made of paper.

Liam’s smile widened, though there was something almost apologetic in it. "I understand your fears and concerns. Which is exactly why I’m going to come to you instead."

There was a brief pause as his words registered.

"Wait, what—" Kristopher started.

But before anyone could finish processing that sentence, Liam moved.

The speed was incomprehensible. One moment he was standing thirty meters away, the next he was simply in front of them, and the displacement of air from his movement hit them like a physical wall. The HUD displays inside their helmets flickered with temperature warnings as the wind he’d created drew in the surrounding Arctic air, dropping the ambient temperature reading by fifteen degrees in an instant.

Their enhanced reaction times—courtesy of the exosuits’ neural interface—meant they actually registered Liam appearing before them rather than simply finding him there after the fact. But registering something and being able to respond to it were entirely different problems.

"Kristopher," Liam’s voice was casual, almost conversational, "watch your legs."

Kristopher’s brain processed the warning. His eyes tracked downward, searching for the threat. His body began responding to the neural command to move.

But none of it was fast enough.

Liam’s foot hooked behind Kristopher’s ankle with surgical precision, a gentle sweep that disrupted his balance at exactly the moment when his weight distribution made recovery impossible.

Kristopher felt his center of gravity shift, felt the inevitable pull of physics asserting itself, and then he was falling backward with the kind of slow-motion clarity that the exosuit’s enhanced perception provided but couldn’t actually prevent.

He hit the ice flat on his back, the impact absorbed completely by the suit’s protection systems, and lay there staring up at the pale sky while his brain tried to reconcile the fact that he’d just been taken down without ever seeing the actual attack coming.

"Your stance was too narrow," Liam’s voice drifted down to him, still perfectly calm. "Exosuits give you enhanced strength, but they don’t change the fundamentals of balance and leverage. If anything, the increased mass makes proper stance more important, not less."

Kristopher made a sound that might have been acknowledgment or might have been just processing the educational feedback while horizontal.

But Liam was already moving again.

"Alex, watch your back."

Alex’s eyes widened. His body tried to turn, the exosuit responding to his neural impulses with impressive speed, rotating his torso, beginning to shift his weight to enable a full turn that would let him see what was behind him.

He made it perhaps thirty degrees through the rotation before he felt the impact.

It wasn’t hard—nothing like the force Liam had used to redirect Matt’s charging attack. This was controlled, precise, just enough pressure applied to exactly the right point on his back to send his half-turned, off-balance body stumbling forward.

The exosuit’s flight systems tried to compensate, firing the hidden stabilization thrusters to arrest his forward momentum, but Alex’s neural commands were panicked and contradictory, and the suit interpreted his intentions as a request to continue forward motion at speed.

He shot across the ice like a missile, his trajectory low and flat, unable to arrest his momentum until he’d covered perhaps fifty meters. When he finally managed to kill his forward velocity and touch down, he stood there for a moment, hands on his knees, processing what had just happened.

"You overcorrected," Liam called across the distance, his voice carrying clearly through the communication system. "The suit amplifies your movements. Small adjustments become large actions. If you panic and throw your weight around, the suit interprets that as intentional force and amplifies it. You have to stay calm and make precise inputs."

Alex waved a hand in acknowledgment, still catching his breath despite the fact that he wasn’t actually winded—the exosuit handled all the physical demands. It was pure mental exhaustion from trying to process movement that his brain wasn’t equipped to track.

Liam turned to the remaining six, and they instinctively clustered together, as though proximity would somehow provide protection.

"Harper," Liam said, his tone almost gentle. "You’re telegraphing."

Harper froze. "I’m not even moving!"

"You shifted your weight to your back foot. Your shoulders tensed. Your hands came up fractionally. Your entire body language is screaming that you’re about to try to dodge backward."

And then Liam was there, inside Harper’s personal space, one hand resting lightly on his chest.

Harper’s backward dodge was already in motion—his weight on his back foot, his body beginning to lean away, the exosuit’s systems engaging to amplify the movement into a proper evasive leap.

Liam’s hand pushed forward with what felt like no force at all, but it hit at exactly the wrong moment in Harper’s movement cycle. The gentle push became a catastrophic disruption to his intended dodge, and instead of leaping backward gracefully, Harper’s feet went out from under him and he sat down hard on the ice, his backward momentum completely arrested.

"Body language matters," Liam said, offering a hand to help Harper up. "Even in powered armor. Maybe especially in powered armor. If I can read what you’re about to do, I can counter it before you fully commit. You need to learn to control those micro-movements, or anyone with sufficient combat experience will be able to predict you."

Harper accepted the hand, got pulled to his feet with effortless ease, and immediately backed up several steps to rejoin the group.

Which now numbered five, since Kristopher and Alex were still recovering from their own encounters.

"Okay," Stacy said, her voice carrying a note of determination mixed with resignation. "This is actually helpful. Humiliating, yes, but helpful."

"Good attitude," Liam said with approval. Then his expression shifted into something more focused. "Now let’s try something different. All of you, together. Coordinate your attacks."

The five of them exchanged glances. The communication system made silent coordination impossible—everything they said, Liam would hear. But years of friendship between the eight of them meant they didn’t need verbal planning for basic concepts.

They spread out, forming a loose semicircle around Liam, each person perhaps ten meters away from the next. The formation gave them multiple angles of approach while maintaining enough distance that they wouldn’t interfere with each other.

"Good instinct on the formation," Liam observed. "Now execute."

Kristy went first, launching herself forward with the exosuit’s flight system, coming in low and fast, aiming for a tackle that would—in theory—drive Liam backward into the path of the others.

Liam sidestepped, his movement minimal and precise, and as Kristy passed him, his hand caught her shoulder and redirected her momentum upward. She shot into the sky like a rocket, her trajectory perfectly vertical, her startled yelp cutting off as she fought to regain control of her flight systems.

Lana came in from the opposite side while Liam was apparently dealing with Kristy, but he was already turning, already moving, and her punch—enhanced by the exosuit to carry several tons of force—met only empty air as Liam simply wasn’t where her fist was going.

His hand tapped the back of her helmet, gentle as a pat, and her own forward momentum combined with the neural panic of having someone behind her sent her stumbling forward, her flight systems engaging erratically as she tried to recover.

Elise tried the patient approach, waiting for an opening, moving in carefully when Liam was supposedly distracted by the others. But somehow he was tracking her even while dealing with Lana and Kristy, and when she committed to her attack, he was already responding, catching her wrist mid-punch and using her own momentum to spin her in a graceful arc that deposited her gently on the ice several meters away.

Stacy and Harper attacked simultaneously from opposite angles, their coordination improved by watching the others’ failures, their timing synchronized through quick glances rather than verbal communication.

Liam smiled.

He dropped low, letting both of their attacks pass over his head, then rose between them with movements too fast to track properly. One hand pushed Harper left, the other pushed Stacy right, and both of them stumbled away from each other, their synchronized attack disrupted by the simplest possible counter.

"Better," Liam said as all five of them regrouped, slightly winded despite the suits handling all physical demands. "You coordinated, you attacked from multiple angles, you tried to use numbers advantage. But you’re still thinking like humans who happen to be wearing powerful suits. You need to think like beings who ARE powerful, who can fly, who can take impacts that would kill unprotected humans. Use your mobility. Use your vertical space. Don’t just run at me—you can fly. Stop fighting like you’re bound to the ground."

Kristy, who had finally managed to descend from her unexpected vertical launch, landed nearby with slightly better control than she’d had thirty seconds ago. "That’s actually really helpful. We’ve been using the suits but not really thinking about how combat changes when you can move in three dimensions."

"Exactly," Liam said. "You can fly. Your enemies—if you ever face them—probably can’t. That’s a massive advantage you’re not using. Let me show you."

He bent his knees slightly, then launched himself straight up.

The movement was so sudden and so fast that the displaced air created a visible shockwave on the ice, and Liam shot into the sky like he’d been fired from a cannon. He climbed perhaps two hundred meters in a couple seconds, then stopped, hovering effortlessly in the pale Antarctic sky.

"Come up here," his voice came through the communication system. "All of you. And this time, use the space. Attack from above, below, from angles I can’t easily track. Make me work for it."

Matt had finally stood up and rejoined the group, apparently recovered from his initial humiliating defeat. "Okay," he said, his voice carrying renewed enthusiasm. "Now we’re talking. Aerial combat. This is what I signed up for."

The eight of them activated their flight systems and rose from the ice, spreading out as they climbed, instinctively using the three-dimensional space Liam had just lectured them about.

The Antarctic landscape spread out below them, endless white in every direction, and above them was nothing but sky and the distant figure of Liam, waiting patiently for their next attempt.

"This is going to be so cool," Matt said.

"This is going to be so painful," Kristopher corrected.

"Both things can be true," Alex observed.

And then they attacked, eight armored figures converging on a single point from eight different vectors, finally starting to use the capabilities their exosuits actually provided rather than fighting like enhanced infantry.

Liam’s smile widened as they approached, and he moved to meet them, his movements through the air as effortless as breathing.