Jack trained like mad in the days that followed, honing his basic power operations and expanding his combat applications hour by hour and day by day, together with the grind of physical training and excessive bulking up with nutrition. The latter did finally tone down a little bit, which was kind of nice, as he stopped being hungry literally all the time. And he filled out gradually, his muscles becoming more defined, his shape transforming entirely to one of an 'athletic build.'

In addition to the customary training methods Lindsay employed, he continued fighting simulated creatures of great variety, some that existed and some that didn't. Among others, he fought giant spiders, large felines, spike-spitting mobile plant monsters, and he also had the dubious honor of being mauled by a rampaging Spotted Orange Cave Bear, apparently an inevitable altercation and benchmark for all cadets. He did catastrophic damage to it, at least — once again, both 'winning' and 'losing,' depending on how you looked at it.

He fought Lindsay in many different scenarios, including increasing applications of weapons and armor, sometimes deliberately non-metallic. Other times, deliberately metal for special training, such as quickly disarming people of various metal weapons. Including handguns. He practiced at jamming the trigger from a distance, or flicking the safety, or just fusing all the works together… or transmuting them directly into shackles. The latter was the most fun, but his 'beginner level' Transmute made doing something like that, at range, more difficult and slower. Still, it was useful training.

And then he trained at 'the dream' — countering bullet fire without an existing barrier. Fortunately, his reflexes and senses could already see bullets traveling, but it didn't help very much at first. He couldn't get a bead on the projectile in a powers sense, nor react fast enough, with memorite. Many, many tries ended with disconcerting bounces off the protective forcefield.

So, Lindsay called a stop, and they shifted to blocking and catching other things. Thrown things? Piss easy. All-metal arrows? No problem. Metal tip arrows? Broken or sent into the dirt with ease. Crossbow bolt? The first one at short distance surprised him and boinked his forcefield, but then he caught six in a row.

They moved on to a slower, subsonic, silenced pistol, delivered by a delivery drone right before she pointed it at him and fired. Thwong! Still too damned fast. So they shifted to the Demonstration Center, where Jill first demonstrated by shooting a gun at herself from a distance, then knocking the bullet off-course, with him feeling how it was done over and over and over.

There was a definitive instinctual aspect to it. It was a lightning-quick flick, and he noticed it was carefully, carefully balanced, in his head like the interplay of multiple magnets working in harmony to manipulate one little point just so. It was the tiniest 'throw' at the right moment, and this was all it took.

A moment. Where the bullet must travel, where it is, as I see it, my perceptions lagging behind, ever a matter of prediction. That's it. I have to follow up on what my eyes see, not rely on it! There must be a well to fall into, directly in the path. I have to feel for it. Use Interpret in tandem with sight.

They switched to him in the driver's seat, and Jill guided him — he missed it the first time, just barely, and Jill was there, adjusting to flick it away. He saw all he needed to, nodding confidently, ready and eager for the next.

'When you're ready, you won't have to… dodge bullets! Mwahahahaha…'

On the second try, the gun fired, and he saw the bullet coming at him… sight was simply not enough to target it, but it gave a keen sense of trajectory, of its movement… he felt ahead of this via Interpret, and what he expected was there, a well calling to him. He collapsed the waiting memorite into it without thinking very consciously… and in a strange combination of 'magnetic' attraction and repulsion, he jerked the metal, knocking the bullet off-course!

From this, he flicked away every bullet that came reliably, and even managed to slow a bullet a bit before losing his 'grip.' It didn't take much force stretched out over a short distance, but it was still very tricky to keep hold of. Slippery.

As soon as a new bullet at a new speed was used, he had growing pains getting even the 'flick' right, but eventually, with diligence, he found the 'sweet' spot and could move on to the next. In short order, at least by his reckoning, he was back in the real world and flicking away 9mm slugs with impunity, fighting off a smile each and every time he did. It was his forever-satisfying defiance of the heretofore unwavering judgment of the military crosshair.

For a long time to come, Jack would be practicing different masses and velocities of projectiles, and his degree of control of the damned things. But it had just become another training regimen on the list.

The bullet list.

In his ongoing plethora of training mixtures, in the facility and at home, he memorized oodles of simple objects for quick-change tactics via Transmute, and practiced at the important ones to develop them at instant or near-instant speed. He otherwise built a whole 'language' of sorts, albeit one that couldn't be spoken, only 'touched' by his power. The names of his blood brothers, as it were. He started with things he was already using, then stuff he might use, and finally was in the realm of 'eh, maybe?' The list went on and on. He requested things to be brought just to copy them, to learn their new name. Scissors, forceps, nails, fish hooks, poles and pipes of various sizes, a shovel, a smorgasbord of tools such as saws, screwdrivers, and wrenches… There were so many wrenches…

He did some work on chain lengths and, with practice and effort, could make a decent 'flail' very quickly, complete with a handle ending in the first link, three more long links, and a spiked ball on the end. If he had a smidge more time, he could add another five links to it, and that was fairly ideal for force application. If he had Transmute 2.0, he knew he could do it instantly.

And then, on to make cords. Despite that the ideal cord had many wires and thus pieces, he could make something plenty strong enough for combat use out of five steel wires bunched together, then twisted into a helical braid, fused at the end to hold it in tension. He manufactured the final pieces himself, doing several sizes this way, the natural flexibility decreasing with overall thickness. Even 4mm wires, bundled to an end diameter of about 12mm, were powerful — and flexible enough to entangle limbs.

Regardless, he learned multiple sizes and memorized the feel of the braided tension, so he could Transmute metal and emulate it quickly, instead of laborious toil to slowly twist the wires into the right form. He memorized the five, ten, and twenty-meter lengths. Practiced spawning them out of source steel over and over. And then, the matter was done: he could make those suckers on a dime.

He also learned how to alter appearances through Transmute. This started with another minor revelation: it was easy to make alloys by simply cramming them together and doing a little 'blip' with Transmute. Playing with copper, tin, iron, bronze, silver, gold, and mixing them together, and then separating them. The latter was slower, but each metal had a distinctive feel or 'taste' to it that could not be hidden by fusion. He could pull one out of the other.

In simply playing around, Lindsay constantly asked him to observe the color and to get a feel for it. He didn't fully understand it, but something translated when he utilized Interpret. Interactions on the surface, especially. With all the distinctive changes from the alloys and ensuing color changes, he quickly had multiple angles or vectors of this perception.

After numerous experiments and shape exercises with new alloys, he'd made a bowl of brass for the first time. Lindsay said, "Now, make it gold."

"Huh?" Jack asked, puzzled. "I don't think I can-"

"I mean, the color gold. Yes, you can do that."

Blinking, he turned his gaze to the bowl… like the interactions on the surface of gold? It was different from brass. But a pinch here, a pinch there; the tiniest transmutation…

The bowl turned the color of gold, if not quite at the same sort of luster. Nonetheless, Jack laughed in amazement, and he and Lindsay shared another triumphant smile.

"Fool's Gold, baby! There it is."

Jack didn't really know how it worked, but changing the surface appearance wasn't hard. Colors were something to do with the surface of the metal and its properties. He supposed it was just how it interacted with light, since that's what colors were. But he could give his metal a righteous paint job, even! Or perhaps the better word was 'tattoo job' or 'stain job,' because it was a bit deeper than the immediate surface. Black was the easiest. Attempting to 'draw' was difficult, but it was absolutely another learned skill developed over time. He could also give it a rougher or smoother finish. A 'polish' job turned it into a mirror.

With higher scores, what? Capture imagery on metal? Substance and style? Damn you, Transmute. You keep looking sexier.

In any case, most training was more practical.

He practiced every day at accurate ranged fire, speed at operation, rapidity of fire, multi-object juggling, and whatever else could help him be deadly from a distance, as well as stalling maneuvers to break stalemates. From experimentation, he found his ideal minimum steel 'throwing bullet' to be about 50 grams, for the sake of mass and 'points of gripping strength,' and double that for a reasonably efficient longer pointed 'dart.' Taking inspiration from a provided replica of a Roman plumbata, he devised a dart at 200 grams, with a fatter weight behind the point, thus functioning as something of a higher mass dual-purpose round. He also memorized the form of a more aerodynamic dart if he wanted to throw something, without guidance, to longer distances. It was more hypothetical than anything.

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Spear was something he decided to go for and get some points in. Having extra skill in direct 'melee' engagement seemed logical. When he asked whether it gave benefits to whacking things with blunt ends, he was given the affirmative. A staff-like object would utilize the technique as well.

His numerous devotions to blocking and knocking stuff aside gave him the general technique Parry, which signified his improved defensive reaction time with the use of his power. Whether flicking bullets, blocking with weapons, or using a shield, it assisted everything equally, and had some relevance beyond the Control stat, such as Interpret to pinpoint speedy projectiles or Create to nullify a bit more Magnitude difference through redirection.

And so the day finally came when Jack once again faced Agent Boiler's Bruiser in VR; he was ready. He dropped a brand-new, secret tactic: he surrounded himself in a big hemisphere of steel pipes branching from his central sphere, like a jungle gym, but with gaps too tight to fit through. It wasn't super strong or heavy, which was by design, but no matter which way the melee specialist came at him, she'd have to contact his metal, and there was very little chance she could do so without him being able to ensnare her. He did not intend to do so with just one leg, either.

She was exceptionally annoyed by this… "Holy fraggin' hell, you pathetic little bitch! I'm gonna pound you in your own cage!"

"We'll see about that," was Jack's calm reply, "... you punkass shitface."

"What did you just call me?!"

"A punk — ass. Shit — face. Faster, now: punkass shitface. Yeesh. Clean out your ears, would you?"

"Grrrah! I'm gonna kill you!"

Jack started the match with an all-out hail of Fragile Spike darts, and, as he suspected sometime (too late) after the first match, she didn't want to get tagged by the high-effectiveness penetrators. His barrage was without reserve, utilizing 'mass-produced' ammo up to a hundred darts that he'd gotten incredibly quick at producing.

She was agile and quick, and wisely used some of her limited speed-burst potential right off the bat, to avoid the first terrible volley. But the process scattered ammo everywhere by design, all fired in slightly downward trajectories. Some shattered, but others skipped and held together, or just broke into large pieces, still usable. As the bruiser tried to bullrush in a similar curve to last time, he popped her multiple times with darts in the flank.

However, she was well on the move, as she absorbed the blows with deep grunts. Quick as sin, quicker once more than he could've imagined, she was bursting through the pipes in a hellacious charge…

Jack was nonetheless much quicker than before to adjust. The pipes had controlling memorite collapsed into them, as they were turned effectively into tendrils on a dime. Those she brushed through put up just enough final resistance to drag her speed just a hair, and as she burst through on the follow-up, one wound around her leg from behind even as she was flying toward him, and the whole construct was part of the brace against her. She tripped and hit the concrete! Excited glee began in Jack's heart.

As she went down, another tendril got her other leg, and she had to turn around on the ground to try and fight the tendrils off. But, by then, he was collapsing the whole dome down on her, like a sudden implosion of a net with a central spherical anchor. The net passed through Jack himself like liquid, reforming on the other side of him as it continued to his doomed, doomed, doomed target!

You just sprung the trap, shitface!

A vast entanglement wrapped her from every angle. She tried ripping it away, only for her hands to pass through; she tried hopping from the ground in his direction for a last try at 'pounding' him, only to eat concrete from the precision jerk at the fold behind her knees. As she collapsed and rolled, Jack managed to wrap a thick tendril around her neck, and he began to constrict it like a snake. Just so, as he'd studied and trained — a sleeper hold to restrict blood flow, focused on pressure from the sides.

No less than the fiercest of struggles ensued as Boiler grabbed at the metal and kept pulling it, fighting for consciousness and breath and trying to get to him at the same time. But he simply backed up the whole time, keeping her at a distance with a vast tangle of metal enshrouding her, and never letting her get enough 'juice' to run in a burst. She couldn't get the metal away but for brief moments. Maybe long enough, maybe not.

Come on, come on, come on! At the tip-top of his output now, sweating in the simulation and surely sweating in his seat in the real world, Jack dared to divide focus a bit, to form sharp spikes with some end-points, and stab her in various spots, forcing more blood loss, attrition damage, and distraction. Thanks to the necessity of her own fierce struggle, they were just able to break the skin, equivalent to scratches. But it was a lot of them, and she failed to find any leeway during his shift of maneuvers. She couldn't stop any of it, and her resistance made it worse. She could hop around a bit, planting her feet quickly and throwing herself, but never enough to get close to him with his level of control over her.

Inevitably, she weakened, drenched in more and more blood, rolling around on stained concrete, and soon began to slow in her jerky movements. Her hands slapped around wetly and randomly instead of pulling the metal away from her neck. And then… that was it. She went limp.

Your opponent has been rendered unconscious; final tangible injury from wounds is at Serious-Unstable. The combat is over. Clearing all injuries.

Despite his exhaustion, Jack thrust his hands up, a devilish sort of triumphant glee coming over him. "Hahahahahaha! I've done it, Lindsay! Hahahahaaa! I got your ass!" He shook his fists up at the starry heavens. "I got you, fair and square, ah hahaha!"

When he looked, Lindsay was rising from where the big, buff form had been, rubbing her neck and squinting over at him. She said nothing as she walked over and paused in front of him, still silent except for her panting breaths. Sweaty hair was plastered to her face. She clasped her hands in front of her and bowed. Jack returned it, sobering quickly from her suddenly subdued mood.

Lindsay looked away thoughtfully, then finally met his eyes and said, "I just thought of an improvement to your strategy. Picture this…" She swept her hands in both directions with a sudden, lively glint in her eyes through the sweat-drenched hair. "Cables inside the pipes! Bursting through would be much more difficult as an actual net collapses inward!"

Jack's eyes widened as one hand rose to his head. "Ohhhhh shiiit, yeeeah…"

His win had taken a lot out of him that time, so high-intensity VR dueling was done for that particular day. On to the next.

When they revisited later on, Jack faced three new foes in succession: a Material Blaster (Wind), an Energetic Stalker (Darkness Shroud), and a Metamorphic Guardian (Stone Body).

Against the first, he quickly had trouble keeping up with a flyer who could AoE knock away his darts while simultaneously moving fast. He was immediately counterattacked from his flank and knocked around, taking damage but regaining his senses to turtle up and put up a decent fight. But whenever he went offensive to try and win, the quick counterattacks constantly battered him. It was death by a thousand cuts, though the last was more of a knockout punch to the back of the head.

The second quickly became a cat-and-mouse game as the area was unstoppably encased in darkness, requiring total Interpret use. Meanwhile, Jack was encased in a metal tank, essentially. A few quick attacks with some kind of solidified darkness hit the outside, but couldn't penetrate. The good thing: his opponent, quasi-melee specialized, needed total line-of-sight, and couldn't teleport, at least. But she faded in and out of any sort of perception he engineered very quickly.

Jack did not legitimately retaliate multiple times in a row, biding his time and getting a feel for how and when to act, similar to his snap timing against bullets. He feinted instead, his twin flails left outside the bubble-tank, swinging too late each time, showing himself to be well off the mark.

When the fourth attack came, he was already acting before the strike hit the wall — but not with the out-of-position flail. The wall itself formed a fist-like wedge and punched the punk right in the face! She was not prepared for this sudden ambush, expecting attacks on the flanks, and she took it right on the chin. Jack didn't bother holding back on the force application, as the information on Stalkers was that they were survivable melee fighters. But they relied on stealth and weren't as hard-bodied in general as Bruisers.

His foe went down, stunned, and Jack pressed his advantage, arcing and slamming down with another crushing hammer blow into the chest, the target not reactive and easy to-

Boom. Win!

The third opponent was an exhausting bout where he could not manage jack shit for damage against the stony, impossible tank he faced. Worse, she was specialized against 'movement inhibitors' at the cost of being very slow. That speed was only just under Jack's own, sadly, and he couldn't sprint all the time if he wanted to try attacking. Jack kept his distance as much as possible, but was often dodging charges and punches as the beast of a creature lumbered through his conjured annoyances. He tried choking and 'cloud' strategies, but the homogeneity of his foe seemed complete, as if she didn't need to breathe in the first place.

Jack simply wore down from fatigue. Meanwhile, 'Rockgirl' was barely expending anything.

So, Jack just started running around and not bothering to attack. 'Normal' fatigue wasn't a huge issue, just power use. His opponent tried to mix it up by ripping up concrete and throwing it, but the accuracy wasn't up to snuff. Jack just dodged it.

After fifteen minutes of the grueling fruitlessness, it was called a draw.

Afterward, Lindsay asked him if he could've done anything different, to which he answered, "Not unless I missed a crack to jump into."

She laughed. "I think you're right. I wanted to see how you'd react, in any case. I wondered if you would game things and try for another 'epiphany,' risking defeat. But this was good training for protracted fights and your general evasiveness, and moreover, reflected something only someone with a degree of maturity would realize: some fights simply cannot be won. Survival is paramount."

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