Perfect Assimilation: Evolution of a Shapeshifting Slime!

The line came easier the second morning.

Ayla stepped into the mat circle, set her feet, and found the column running through her body within the first minute.

The hour Kareem had set for her yesterday was the warm-up today. The morning’s full session would be two hours, and she had already decided she would clear it without a single sway.

She closed her eyes. Her breath settled. She had counted to thirty when the cold hit.

A wind cut across the chamber from her left side with the weight of a direct attack from a Bronze-ranked Crusader.

The temperature dropped minus degrees in a single second. The air pressure shoved her shoulder. Her hips broke the line. Her left foot slid two inches. She fell on her side.

"What the hell?"

Ayla sat up on the mat, hair across her face, breath caught. Kareem stood across the floor with his hand still raised. The cold receded back into him slowly, the way a tide returns to the sea.

"Did any fight you have ever been in allow you to stand in one place?"

She opened her mouth and closed it. That was true.

"You found the line yesterday in still air. Still air is not an opponent. The line must hold in wind. In fire. In a chamber that tilts. In a corridor that floods. The body must know the line in any condition. That is how the permission to move the body becomes yours instead of your environment’s."

She pushed her hair back behind her ear and stood up. Kareem did not give her time to set her feet.

A second gust. Lower this time. She felt it strike her ankles. Her stance compensated late and her hips broke the line again.

"Sway."

She got up. A pulse of warm air. Then cold. Then warm again. Her body kept losing the line.

"Sway."

She got up.

Two hours.

By the end of the session, Kareem had cycled through nine different environmental pressures.

Cold wind. Hot draft. Sudden shifts in floor incline that the chamber’s hidden mechanisms allowed at his command.

Light flickering between bright and dark. Sound at unpredictable volumes. A floor surface that grew slick under her left foot and dry under her right.

Ayla failed each of them. Then, slowly, she stopped failing.

By the eighth iteration of cold wind, her body found the line before the gust struck. By the eleventh shift in floor incline, her hips adjusted while the floor was still tilting.

By the second hour, the only condition she still consistently lost was the slick-and-dry floor, because half her foot was in one world and half her foot was in the other.

Kareem’s mind-voice slipped through the Twin Lens once.

’She is fast.’

He was inwardly praising her, though he didn’t show any expression outside. Ayla pressed her lips together so the smile would not show on her face.

When the bell chimed the lunch hour, Kareem nodded once.

"Afternoon, we add a second pressure on top of the first. The line must hold in two conditions at once."

"Yes."

She stepped out of the chamber. Kenji was waiting in the corridor. He took one look at her face and his shoulders went tight.

The composure she was wearing was the kind of composure she wore when she was hiding something. Her eyes were evading his, clearly planning something.

"What are you planning?"

"Nothing."

She did not look at him. Her eyes drifted toward the floor. Kenji’s brows pulled together. He stepped closer.

"You are really hiding something. What is it? Do not tell me." His eyes widened. "Did you eat Instructor Kareem?"

Ayla elbowed him in the ribs. "Not yet."

"Yet?"

She pushed past him and started walking faster. Kenji caught up in three strides. His suspicion sharpened. Whatever she was planning was not good.

"Ayla. Stop."

She did not stop. She quickened her pace. He matched her. The two of them passed through the corridor at a near-run. The marble floor reflected their footsteps. Ayla’s eyes glinted. She stopped.

Kenji could not stop in time. He hit her back at full pace.

She is going to be sent flying. She is weaker than I am.

The thought was technically correct. Ayla’s body had less mass, less density, and less raw physical strength than the Atlantis Academy’s number one runner.

Kenji’s training had been seven years of conditioning. Hers had been two days.

He had time to think one full sentence before his feet left the ground.

Ayla’s First Gate held under his impact the way the line was supposed to hold under any condition.

The weight of her head passed down through the column of her body and into the floor. Her feet did not slide. Her hips did not break.

She received his momentum and redirected it through her shoulder into the angle Kenji had been moving along.

Kenji’s body rotated. The ceiling zoomed in. Then the floor. Then the ceiling again. He hit the marble with a loud, undignified thud.

He lay flat on his back, staring up at the chandelier, breath punched out of him.

Ayla looked down at him. Her face was the picture of polite concern. Her eyes were laughing.

"Oh no. Brother. Are you hurt?"

Kenji groaned. "You absolute monster."

"Brother. Such language."

She offered him a hand. He glared at it. He took it. She pulled him upright with a face full of smiles.

Ayla finally got her revenge for the last day. She was too happy, beaming all the way toward the dining room. He limped to follow her.

Sarah was at the dining room when they arrived. She took one look at Kenji’s bruised cheek and the small cut at his eyebrow and rounded on him before Ayla had time to compose her expression.

"Kenji. What did you do?"

"I tripped."

"You tripped?"

"On a rug."

Sarah’s eyes narrowed. She did not believe him. She also did not press, because Ayla was already at the dining room table arranging two cushions on his chair.

"Sit, brother. The cushions will help your back."

Kenji sat. Ayla pushed a small bowl of clear broth toward him.

"This one is for bruising. The cook said so."

She pushed a plate of poached fish toward him. "This one is also for bruising."

She pushed a small dish of dark green leaves toward him. "This one I do not know what it does, but it is bitter, so it must be good for you."

Kenji stared at the green leaves. Sarah, watching from across the table, finally broke into a small smile despite herself.

"Eat, my heart. Your sister is taking very good care of you."

Ayla beamed. Kenji ate the bitter leaves. His sister was certainly taking care of him. By the end of lunch, Kenji had been forced through four different bruising remedies, two cups of an herbal infusion he disliked, and a small piece of dark chocolate Ayla had insisted was "for the spirit."

His expression had progressed from suffering to resigned to faintly amused. He could not stay angry at her, not when she was so attentively serving him.

Perhaps having her as a little sister wasn’t a bad idea.

Ayla finished her own meal in good cheer. She walked back to the training facility with a spring in her step that Kareem caught the moment she crossed the threshold of the chamber.

His mind-voice surfaced once.

’The little lass is in a good mood.’

Ayla pressed her lips together again. He was going to keep calling her that until she gave him a reason to stop. Eventually she would beat him, and she would eat his brain.

The training continued without any delays. At the end of it, she had mastered the First gate: The root.

"You have learned the first gate. Tomorrow, you will learn the Second gate."