Kitty was almost cheerful through the works shifts of the weekend. Life here was still hellish, but it seemed a little more bearable now. At her next training session, she was called to the table right after she recited the litany. "Sir? Ma'am?" She tugged at the sleeves of her newly issued leather uniform.
"You may have noticed your new outfit," Agent Howards said. She nodded. "You are now going to be introduced to your weapons." He gestured to the table where a wide array of blades was laid out. "These little ones are straight shurikens, a sort of small throwing knife. They go in the row of slots down both your arms and legs. Put them on." She began putting the sharp metal strips into their slots, side by side, marching down her limbs. She could feel weight they added to her.
"The larger blades are also for throwing, they have a greater heft, and therefore greater impact. Your suit has sheaths for them, here," he directed her hand to openings at her upper back, three on either side of her neck. "And here," at her low back were more openings, three to each side. "And lastly, on your outer thighs, two to the front and two to the back of each. Equip them."
She blew out her breath when she put the last of them in. He smiled without humor. "Heavy, aren't they? All your trainings from now on, after your oath, will start with you putting on these blades, and you'll do your workouts including their weight. The last four are your hand fighting knives. About half-way between a dirk and a dagger, you'll carry them in your boot sheaths, and in these." He and Agent Vaile took her wrists and strapped on them a bracer / sheath combo meant to hold the daggers ready to hand.
He gave her two of the big blades, and she put them into the sheaths built into the outside her boots. She stamped her feet, trying to get used to them, and felt the extra metal all over her body. "Here's how you put them into your wrists devices. Press the hilt like so, into the catches, until you hear the click. They're locked in place now. Push on that spot to release them. You'll be practicing with them, a lot."
He put on the same sort of bracers, and filled them with daggers. "Alright. Now, here's the real trick to these. Dangle your hands at your sides, and shake your wrists back and forth fast, like this. He shook his wrists, and the hilts of the blades shot down into his hands. "You gotta be fast to catch them…" She tried to imitate his movements... Clatter. "…before they fall on the floor," he finished.
Oops. She braced herself for his displeasure, but he only sighed. "Pick them up. When I tell you too, you'll do that until you can catch them reliably, and I'll decide when that is. One last change to your training." He took off her collar. "Your sessions will now include you power. Perform well, and you will be allowed to leave it off. I believe you saw some Hounds at the Social without them?" She flushed, and nodded. "Well, that's something to strive for, then."
Briefs and boxers and bras. Black uniform pants and dirty socks. Gray jumpsuits and leather cat suits. It all came through the laundry room. Working here was unpleasant, but only mildly so. At least she liked the company.
"How's your training coming along. Getting any better at the target practice?" Okay, so she could do without talking about her training, but Karla was only trying to be nice. She guessed.
"Yeah, I am." Kitty took a dripping load of clothes and stuffed it into a dryer. "9 times out of 10 I can hit the target right in the crotch. Even Agent Howards is impressed, and that takes some doing. I still don't know if I like having all those knives on me, but it's not like it's my idea."
"There's my girl. I'll bet it makes him nervous." Karla was sorting through laundry sacks, pulling out some of the contents to get an idea of which load they belonged in. She snickered. "Here, you deal with this one," as she tossed a bag to her.
Kitty frowned at her, and pulled out the contents. The jumpsuits said it belonged to a Hound, and the boxers said it was a guy, although a slender one. Then she spotted the tail hole opposite the fly. "Kurt…"
"Since you haven't been able to stop talking about him, you can do his laundry." Karla grinned. "And maybe, you'll find some evidence in there that he's been thinking about you, if you know what I mean." She winked and waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
"Karla! You're awful." Kitty threw a towel at her.
"Hey, I just talked to the guy for a while. You're the one who slow danced with him. So, did he use his tail?"
"Only to hold us together." Kitty's eyes got far away, as she went through the rest of the bag. Ugh. The legs of some of his jumpsuits reeked. What had he been walking in? She threw those into the 'heavily soiled' load.
"Do tell? How close?" Karla smiled.
"Hey, I don't ask about you and Brad." Karla took a deep breath as if to tell her all about it… "And I don't wanna know!"
"Coward."
"You bet!"
"I belong to Shield. They own my very breath. I live at their whim, I die at their whim. I will serve in whatever I am commanded." She got up and loaded her suit with blades. She was getting used to them. Their weight and their feel didn't hinder her as much as they used to.
She still didn't want to think about what they wanted her to become. If she was any less well adjusted, she might slit her own throat before they made her into a murderer. Too bad 'thou shalt not kill' applied to one's self.
Agent Vaile put up a target. "Use every blade, smallest to largest." Beginning with the shurikens, she peppered the dummy with spikes, running along all four limbs. The twenty throwing knives she made sure to place around the torso, in serious but not immediately vital locations.
The daggers snapped into her hands, and she reversed them and threw. Heart. Left eye. She slipped her last two blades from her boots and snapped then into place in her wristbands, because reloading in the field was something she was supposed to practice. Right eye. Throat.
She still wasn't as strong or had as much endurance as they wanted but her anatomy drills were perfect, and they had no complaints about her throwing skills and accuracy. Hand to hand was still something she struggled with. She was sent to the floor less often than before, but still too much for her trainer's liking. Then there was her power. Well, her power wasn't really under her conscious control a lot of the time.
The turning her power on and off took too long. Her active phasing endurance was about 25 minutes now, but they wanted her to be able to pulse in and out of phase. She could phase to avoid some paint balls, but then got creamed as she stopped moving to phase back in and throw knives at the auto-guns. It was still a work in progress, Agent Howards told her.
Today she'd done her warm-up calisthenics, then a few laps around the big room and some boffer sparring with Agent Vaile. A sheen of exertion was just beginning to show on her face when Agent Howards called to her. "My partner is going to put up several 'smart' targets for a timed trial or two. Watch for the lights. When a target is green it's an active target. Use your blades until the light goes red. At irregular intervals, a new target will activate, so take them out quick. If more than one target is active at a time, the motion sensors will trigger the auto-guns. So you'll have to retrieve your blades while the test is going, before a new target activates, preferably. Begin when the tone sounds."
Kitty stood ready, and her hands stroked over her blades, making sure they were all in place. Vaile set up the last of the targets, and walked to the table. The tone went off, and one of the dummies lit up with a concealed green floodlight. She stepped forward and began throwing.
She had to take them out as fast as possible, without using up all her weapons, especially the important ones. The first few went red cleanly, and she was even able to recover some of her knives in between targets. Then a new target lit up shortly after she engaged the previous one. The first set of auto-guns swiveled at her. She phased through the paint barrage, and while she returned to solidity, another target activated.
The rest of the guns turned on her, and she was splattered by a crossfire of paint. The test ended and Kitty trudged to the table where they hosed off the water based marks. Howards frowned at her. "Be more aggressive, Hound." You can't do everything you need to from a safe throwing distance. Just because you can throw the daggers doesn't mean you always should. Sometimes you get better results when you get in close to the target."
"Yes, sir."
"Recover your knives and get ready to do it again." She hurried to prepare.
Once more, she stood at the ready. Mindful of what he'd said, she stepped closer to the targets. The first one was on the far end this time, and she dodged around a couple of dummies to get good throws in. Two knives to the chest, and it flashed red. The dummy next to her flashed green, and she popped a dagger and stabbed it in the throat. Red. She had time to get her knives before the next one activated.
Using a combination of close up stabs and distance throws, she made all the targets light up red, and the guns never twitched. She turned to the table to see what their reaction was. They weren't paying attention to her; instead they were talking to someone. The new man glanced over at her and said something to them. Howards looked at the red-lit dummies and gestured her to turn around. She did, showing there was no paint on her.
He nodded. "Better. Get your blades and stand ready." She nodded in return, and readied herself again, as they walked out of the room as a group.
What was going on? A rumble behind her made her turn to the back of the room. A service door opened, and through it stepped a figure. He wore a tattered sleeveless jumpsuit, but it was work-gang orange instead of Hound gray. He was huge; over seven foot tall and about five foot wide. His skin was darkly tanned, with a pale band of flesh at his neck.
The man was a mutant. If his size alone didn't tell her that, the long horns on his head did, and the splayed cloven hooves he had for feet. Massive muscles rippled down his bare arms, and he moved easily, if heavily into the room. He caught sight of her, and stepped nearer, squinting his dark eyes.
"Oooooh," he rumbled. "Ox like. Ox like 'em nice an' young." He rubbed his crotch, and zipped his suit down until it was open to the groin. "They say Ox could play today. Wanna play, pretty?" He reached down into his suit and touched himself as he stalked toward her.
She backed up, her mind spinning in helpless circles. They wouldn't let this… this monster hurt her, would they? Well, there was all that about 'I die at their whim', but this was some kind of whim!
He slowly closed the distance between them, and she could see something dark red rearing up in front of his hairy belly. Where the hell were her trainers?
She hit a wall, and began sliding against it, still staring. As he reached the silent dummies in the middle of the room, a spot light lanced down from the ceiling and shown done on him. He was bathed in green light, and he stopped and peered upward. "Why green light?" There was no answer, so he shrugged. "It a pretty color." He looked back at her and smiled with brown and crooked teeth.
Oh God. She knew what the light was for. Ox had been given to her as a target, and if she failed… she'd get something a lot worse than a scolding from Howards. He'd been saying something about her motivation. Kitty didn't think she'd have any trouble finding her motivation today.
She kept edging around the wall, studying him, but trying not to look at what was bobbing there in front of him. It was as big around as her arm, for God's sake. It would kill her, certainly.
He bunched the muscles of his legs, and leaped twenty, thirty feet through the air, landing with a clattering thump near her. Long hairy arms reached out for her, but she ducked and phased, air-walking away, past the targets. He stood for a minute, looking to see where she'd gone, confused. Turning around he caught sight of her again.
"Pretty playin' hard ta get?" He grinned, thumbing his chest. "Used to be Bull, but then got cut. Now just Ox, but Ox can still hump the pretties, you'll see."
Unfortunately, she could see, but she was able to look beyond that now. Anatomy lessons filtered back to her. Not only did the bigger ones fall harder, but their vital areas were bigger, too. She took out three shurikens, and when he stepped closer she whizzed them at him.
Shit. His skin was thick or something. Two bounced off, one nicked him and fell away. "Ow." He looked down at the spot of blood. "Pretty wanna play rough?" His brows furrowed darkly. "Ox can play rough, too."
He scraped his feet; right, left, right, then lowered his head and charged. He snapped a target off at the base in a tackle that would have terrified a pro linebacker, and sent it spinning away. She wasn't anywhere near him for him to grab, though. She'd seen him prepare to charge and moved.
Before he turned again, she sent one of her throwing knives into his back at the kidney region. She'd meant for it to stick in to the hilt, but his hide foiled her once again, only allowing a few inches to penetrate.
He bellowed a roar of pain and rage, and charged her with frightening speed and grace. She phased through a few dummies, air-walking to the side. She thought about phasing through the floor and out of the room, but realized that she'd been given a test and a target. To leave was to fail; quite seriously this time. Perhaps fatally.
He pulled the knife out, and tossed it from him. It went pin-wheeling away, trailing splotches of blood. He smeared a crimson stained hand under his splayed nostrils, and growled. "Ox gonna fuck ya, then Ox gonna kill ya, pretty."
He started leveling the dummies, removing her cover. He was inhumanly strong and fast, and all she had was her phasing, her knowledge, and her blades. When the last of the targets were laid low, he came to her, crouching, and ready to react to any dodges.
She stepped up to him, and he blinked and grabbed at her. Whoosh. His big arms went right through her, and he glared in fury. Then she went solid and pushed a dagger into his side with all of her weight until it was deeply set. When he screamed she fled, running in solid form to get some distance, because air-walking was way too slow. She replaced the dagger with one from her boot, and waited.
He pulled this blade out, too; with a gout of blood that she could smell half the big room away. An analytical part of her mind wondered if he knew ripping the knives out like that was making him bleed worse. "Maybe Ox kill ya first, then he fuck ya!"
He gathered and leaped, and she was ready, half phased into the floor. Just before he landed, she dove for where his backside would be, and as he thumped down to the floor, she shoved a dagger deeply into the shallow wound the throwing knife had made earlier.
Olé, she thought. Cut him and run. Hurt him, and then get some distance. He was starting to slow down, or at least she hoped so, panting from his wounds and the blood loss. He was fast, but he took time to build up speed. She was more maneuverable, and the phasing added an element to her ability to evade him.
In a surreal way, this was a bullfight, and she was the matador. And if he actually caught her, she would be just as dead as that matador, torn under the hooves and horns of the bull.
He couldn't pull this last blade out. It was set awkwardly behind him, deeply buried. He paced towards her, still very dangerous, but leaving a trail of blood drops and splatters behind him. He readied and jumped again. She thought he was trying to close the distance to her again, so she sprinted to his launching point. But, this jump was more of a low hop, and he reached down from mid air and smacked her, sending her tumbling across the floor.
Kitty went sprawling from the impact; face and chest burning, feeling dazed and waiting for him to land on her. She forced herself to look up when he didn't. He'd landed badly, it seemed, so she got up and ran over to him. He started to turn with a snarl, and she kicked him hard in the side that was bloody, both in front and back. He gave a groan and leaned over to cough up blood.
She kicked the hilt protruding from his back, and he moaned and slumped further, retching. She snapped a dagger into her hand, and put a foot on his shoulder. She raised the blade, aiming for the base of his neck at the spine, and a red spotlight flooded them both. She hesitated, and then she raised it again, wanting only to finish him for good…
"Stop!" Howards ordered.
Her trainers and the other man were at the door. Agent Vaile grabbed her arms and pulled her away from her target. The stranger examined the big mutant. "He'll survive. He's had worse. Good thing you got that little hellcat away when you did, though, or I'd be out a worker."
Kitty started to shiver. She looked at the gore-smeared blade still clutched in her hand, and almost dropped it.
Howards said, "Teach her how to clean blood off of her blades." The woman nodded, and directed her to retrieve her blades. She did so, numbly, and Howards handed her the one she'd left in the man's back.
He smiled. "I knew I could find a good motivation for you."