Fully twice the size of the other groups, the Chikara division stood two hundred and nineteen strong.  Having lost only thirty-one subjects, the section was the second largest in size of all of the nine divisions.

Though the children in the group had no inconceivable powers to control the world around them, they were still adept in their own rights.  They were infinitely stronger than any of the other subjects and their endurance knew almost no limits and between the two attributes, they were dangerous.  The doctors constantly assessing the group were painfully aware of that fact.  There had been a few accidents on the testing range.  Unsurprisingly, none of the children had been hurt.

The head physician wandered through the smaller groups the subjects had been broken into, taking notes and snapping an occasional order to the other doctors.  The generals stayed far out of the way after what had happened the previous week.  Three of them had been crushed by a mobile suit that one of the boys had accidentally dropped.  The children around them had been unharmed despite being under the several ton machine.

Making a quick note to move the weight lifting trials further away from observers, he looked up in time to witness another of the foot races.  His eyes widened.  Flipping pages in his charts quickly, he scribbled down a few notes on two of the subjects.  They had just been clocked at over fifty miles per hour.  Granted, some of the boys from the Kage and Juuryoku divisions had been timed at sixty and one of the girls in the Mizu division had come in at well over ninety, but it was still impressive.

Curious, he flipped to the nearby charts depicting their physical strengths and quickly looked up the two boys.  Dark eyes widened in shock.  They were far ahead of the rest of the division.  He wondered how he had been so blind to miss the staggering difference in numbers for so long.

"Ten thirty-one and ten eighty-four," he barked.  "Front and center."

Not even breathing heavily after their display, the two indicated boys jogged obediently to stand before the head physician, silently awaiting his order.  The physician nodded to himself, pleased that the subjects in his division were obedient.  He hadn't yet been forced to kill any of them for insubordination.

He pointed to the open range far from the group and observing generals to an inactivated mobile suit.

"Destroy it."

Undaunted by the command, the boys sprinted to the hulking metal figure, reaching their full running speeds within the first two steps of their dash.  As a single unit, they skidded to a halt by the legs of the unmoving suit, each of them latching their small arms to one of the massive metal ankles.  Hands sunk into the metal as though into soft clay.  Without conferring with one another, the two five-year-olds reared back, lifting the suit off of the ground.  For a mere moment, nothing happened.  Then, with an ear-splitting screech of protesting metal, the several ton suit was split like a wishbone, the halves tossed carelessly aside.

Done with their assigned task, the two boys began a leisurely trot back to await further orders.

Almost upon the physician, they stumbled, showing the first signs of clumsiness any of the children had ever displayed.  They maintained their footing, but slowed to a halt, eyes glazing over.  Before the head physician could yell at them, he became aware of the pressing stillness around him.  He scanned the area with wide eyes, his face going pale.

All of the children were standing perfectly motionless and silent, violet eyes fixed to the north.  Screams began to split the air, the children's cries lost in the explosions around them.  Waves of fire and wind buffeted the doctors and subjects alike, driving them to huddle against the ground helplessly.  The earth below them heaved, splitting to form deep chasm.  Dozens were lost into the split in the earth, their screams suddenly understood when magma poured from the crack in the planet.

The two boys who had been returning from the mobile suit spun to face each other, drawing their fists back to strike.  Darkness began to descend upon them as they lashed out, fists meeting midway.  The impact created a shockwave, the force of their twinned blows lashing outwards to drive the powers of the other divisions away.  The two surviving generals and sole surviving doctor watched in horror as the rolling wave of power overtook the remainder of the division in a heartbeat, tearing them apart.  An instant later, the wave reached them.

The two boys continued to scream, their voices lost in the maelstrom of power.

*     *     *

Although the division had started out with three hundred seventy-five subjects, thrice the number of the other groups, Terekineshisu to Terepashii had only one hundred fifty-seven survivors remaining.  All of the children were small.  Frail.  Yet, they never became ill and none of them remained injured for long.

Due to the importance of the group, each subject had a personal instructor.  The individual attention was necessary, each of the students progressing at different speeds and with massive differences in abilities.  Sixteen supervising doctors circulated the division, taking detailed notes on the children and reporting anything relevant to the head physician.  Three of the children, two boys and one girl, were testing immeasurably higher than the remainder of the division.  Five, all boys, were well behind were they should be.  And a single boy, thinner and sicklier than his peers, was at a total loss.

Hearing that report for the thousandth time, the doctor in charge of the division cursed under his breath as he double-checked his charts.  Dismissing the supervising physician, he stalked across the room, intent on learning why the boy was unable to use any of the abilities that should have been programmed into his very being.  The young woman whom he had pushed aside bit her lip and trotted after him.

"Sir?" she began, only to be cut off.

"Not now," he growled.

"Sir," she continued doggedly, refusing to be brushed off.

"Yes?" the head physician inquired, only half listening.

His attention was on the boy only a few steps from him who was cowering on the floor in front of his frustrated trainer.  So far, the boy had managed to do nothing that the group had been engineered to do.  He could neither master telekinesis nor telepathy as his peers had managed long ago.  His trainer was beginning to grow frustrated, the numerous bruises on the boy's face and arms speaking silently of his irritation.

Before he could begin to yell at the boy, he was deterred again by the young woman beside him.

"I have a bad feeling about this," she muttered, refusing to meet his gaze directly, instead keeping her eyes masked by her overlong caramel bangs.  "We… we shouldn't be toying with something so dangerous."

"Why not?  A weapon is a weapon."

"They're only children," the younger doctor murmured.  Seeing the impatient look from her superior, she continued in a stronger voice, still not meeting his eyes.  "What happens when they get older and decide they don't want to listen anymore?  What happens when we lose control?"

"Any of them who won't obey will be terminated."

"Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt," the younger woman grumbled.

"What was that, Damia?"

The young woman straightened, glaring outright and grinding her teeth audibly.  She locked glares with the older man, refusing to back down.

"I've been thinking about this for a few years now," she spat.  "We're dealing with something that we never should have and I quit.  I want out before we lose control of this… this crime against nature!  You're going to lose control and I don't want to be here when that happens."

"Keep your voice down!"

"No, I will not!  Don't you understand?  When they've finally had enough, there's nothing that can stop them from breaking free!"

"Damia!"

"You cannot control them," she said in a pained voice that resounded clearly through the room.  "I'm not going to stay to see you lose control.  And as well you should.  This isn't right."

"Enough!  Get out!"

Flinching visibly under the roar of the head physician, she turned and slunk out of the lab.  Doctors, generals and children alike watched her leave, her words still resounding loudly through their minds.  Cursing again, the head physician rounded on the cowering boy.  Sighing, his personal trainer spoke up for the first time.

"Dr. Barton," he started tentatively.  "The boy is a failure.  He has yet to display any sort of ability beyond what a normal five-year-old would be capable of."  He sighed loudly and scrubbed one hand through his already messy hair.  The tangles in his blond mop spoke loudly of the nervous habit that portrayed his frustration.  "He is a waste of time.  I… I recommend that we terminated him."

"We should not be wasting time and money on worthless specimens," Barton spat, scrubbing his short graying hair out of his eyes.  He turned his dull eyes on the shivering boy at his feet, scowling darkly.  "This is your last chance, fourteen eighteen."  The boy nodded miserably, staring intently at the floor.  Barton scowled, lashing out with a booted foot and kicking the small child in the stomach.  The boy curled around himself, gasping silently.  "You are not to move," he hissed.

"Sir," the trainer objected softly, trailing off at the furious glare he received.  Swallowing, he gathered his courage and plowed on.  "We're going to kill him anyways, sir.  There's no need to torture him."

"I have permission from Romefeller to do as I wish," Barton snapped.  "If I want to skin him alive, that's my call.  Do you understand?"  The instructor dropped his head and nodded miserably.

"Yes, sir."

"What about you, fourteen eighteen?" he snarled.  "Do you understand?"

Rather than answering aloud, the boy rolled to his feet and stood at attention, grinding his teeth down on his tongue as he fought to refrain from gasping for air.  His features remained impassive, emotionless.  Barton grunted, disappointed that he couldn't find something to punish the boy for.  Irritated, his eyes roved around for the nearest object with which to test the boy.  His eyes fell on the chair the trainer was sitting in.  The man scrambled out of his seat.  Barton nodded stiffly.

"Fourteen eighteen," he clipped icily.  "Move the chair."

The boy's head turned minutely to face the object he had been ordered to shift, his features scrunching up slightly in concentration.  The rolling chair remained exactly where it was.  A look of despair crossed the five-year-old child's face.  Barton backhanded him, the ring on his right hand cutting a long gouge along the boy's cheek.

"Fuck this," Barton growled, drawing a gun from the holster at his hip.  Frightened violet eyes rose to stare at his impassive face.  "I don't have time to concern myself with you.  Good riddance, brat."

"You cannot control us," the boy said suddenly, repeating what Damia had said only moments before.  He plowed on before Barton could open his mouth, a note of desperation entering his childish voice.  "We're children.  We'll get older.  You cannot control us forever!"

"Either way, you won't live to see it," Barton sneered.  He pulled the trigger.

Blood splattered across the floor.  Violet eyes widened in disbelief, pupils dilating to obscure the pure amethyst color.  The boy sank to his knees, bony arms wrapping miserably around the bullet hole in his narrow chest.  A feeble cough escaped his lungs and he curled tighter around himself, raising pleading eyes to the man in front of him.  Barton aimed for a second shot at the boy's chest.  A second deafening crack resounded through the room.

Terror and agony swept across the youthful face, freezing his features just at the brink of tears.  He gulped a breath in defiance of his crippled lungs, swallowing the blood pooling in his mouth.  Muscles rippled across his face, pulling his features into a furious scowl.  He lunged to his feet just as Barton pulled the trigger a third time, staggering as the bullet ripped through his abdomen.  His expression shifted to pure loathing.

He arched his head back, a howl of pain and betrayal escaping his throat.  Violet light flared in the room around his trembling form.  The three holes in his trunk and the deep gouge along his cheek sealed themselves in an amethyst burst of energy.  Dried flecks of blood rose into the air from the wounds.  Everyone began to back away as the youth rose into the air, fire and lightening crackling in the winds whipping around his slight form.

Barton spun to flee, skidding to a horrified stop at the sight that met his eyes.  The remaining one hundred fifty-six subjects in the Terekineshisu to Terepashii division were facing the rampaging boy, all of them surrounded by blinding violet light.  One by one, they threw their heads back, their cries of fury joining their brother's.

Terrified, Barton attempted to escape, the doctors and generals a half a step behind him.  He twisted his ankle in a desperate attempt to stop his mad dash towards the door that was engulfed in the blackness of the purest shadows.  Backpedaling brought him face to face with a wall of razor sharp wisps of water surrounding piles of mutilated flesh that only seconds ago had been his colleagues.  The earth bucked, nearly sending him into the deadly wall of water.  A wave of intensified gravity flattened him to the floor before he was abruptly minced, the sudden force crushing him to the floor as the earth roiled a second time.  A spike of granite erupted from the ground, piercing his thigh and holding him captive.  Barton forced his gaze up in time to see a devastating shockwave of power descend upon him.

His death was only the beginning.  The boundless powers roiled across every doctor, general and experimental subject in the immediate area, surging outwards in an arc of irrefutable power.

Of the thousands in the radius of the psychic explosion, only ten survived.

*     *     *

Damia ran from the testing range, desperately straining to gain distance before the inevitable.  She leapt onto her motorcycle, not bothering with her helmet in her haste.  As she skidded to a halt near the final check point, frantically keying in her personal code, she snapped her face up to the security camera, a feral grin crossing her elfin features.  Her wide violet eyes glittered up at the camera.

"Get 'em, G," she growled.

Gassing her bike, she surged forward in an explosive burst of acceleration, leaning forward viciously to prevent her bike from pulling into a wheelie.  The winds whipping around her wiry form pulled her hair out of her white lab coat, the hip-length golden brown braid flying behind her as she sped away from the compound.

*     *     *

Treize stared at his computer in disbelief for several seconds before his mind short-circuited.

Does not compute… floating point error… invalid argument… syntax error… division by zero… system overload… game over…

Unable to do anything else, he surrendered to the inevitable and passed out.

*     *     *

In a clear state of shock, four Gundam pilots stared, numbed to the core, at a laptop screen.  Quatre was the first to speak, though what he managed was entirely unhelpful.

"Allah," he squeaked.

"They work for the Romefellers and Bartons," Heero growled.  His cobalt eyes narrowed and focused in on Trowa.  The European pilot paled.

"It's just a code name!" Trowa protested, backing away several paces, emerald eyes wide.  Heero grunted.

"It's obvious that the Maxwells aren't fond of the people who… who created them," Wufei ground out.

"I think we can trust them," Quatre said softly, his hands pressed firmly to his chest.  "I can feel it."

"I want to know why they haven't been using their abilities before now," Heero growled.  "We could have won this war by now!"

"There could be a reason we don't know about," Wufei said reasonably, slowly turning purple as he forced himself to defend the braided lunatics.  "It would be dishonorable to accuse them without knowing the reasons behind their actions."

"There's something else that the rest of you missed," Trowa managed weakly.  When he had all of their attentions, he looked up with haunted eyes.  "The doctor that escaped.  Damia."  When no one seemed to understand, he exploded.  "Didn't you see her?  She looked just like them!  And her name… Damia is Greek for 'goddess of the forces of nature.'  Don't you get it?  Their mother survived!"

The other pilots paled.

*     *     *

"Well, they know," Dante muttered.  "Now what?"

The clustered Maxwells glanced at each other somberly for several seconds.  The solemn atmosphere was abruptly shattered when Darren grinned.

"Now we don't have to hold back," he chuckled, eyes glinting evilly.

To Be Continued…

I know, I know.  I'm taking forever.  Forgive the poor hapless student who has to read and memorize 500 pages a night.  And I can too use the medical student excuse forever.  Or at least for the next few years.  This is hard, man.  I've seen one class, one single hour of lecture, cover more than an entire course did in a semester of college.  I can never express my joy at seeing all of my experience of histology and biochemistry shoot by in less than three hours of lecture.  I'm just thankful that we don't have to do the whole organic chemistry lab thing again.  My best friend and I were responsible for a building being evacuated in undergrad.  (Sadly enough, that is not a joke.)  Chemicals and I simply do not mix.  O_O;

On the bright side, now that I'm done with their pasts, I can get back to their psychotic behavior.  R&R!!!

Damia, in case you're wondering, actually is a Greek name meaning 'Goddess of forces of nature.'  I wasn't making that up.  I saw it while poking around online and I couldn't resist.  Can you blame me?

Now for the notes I promised…

Division – English translation – survivor

Honoo – fire – 14 (Derrick)

Mizu – water – 180 (Deut)

Daichi – earth – 312 (Donovan)

Kaze – air – 383 (Darren)

Kage – shadow – 546 (Dustin)

Juuryoku – gravity – 678 (Duo)

Denki – electricity – 819 (Dante)

Chikara – strength – 1031, 1084 (David, Daniel)

Terekineshisu to Terepashii – telekinesis and telepathy – 1418 (Demitri)

Oh!  Be sure to check out a companion fic by Srsilverhawk.  She's writing a story called Shinigami Rising that goes into the lives of the kids of the Shinigami Project.  She now has the first part up.  Go read it!