School Spirit (Part Five)

They were getting more serious for the team challenges. For the first event, two members of each team would have to square up and fight an actual living, flesh-and-blood member of the X-Men. There was only one place on the premises that could accommodate something like that.

I felt a nagging itch in the back of my head as we stepped into the Danger Room. Whatever it was, I had to ignore it and focus.

Hisako and I were the money combo for combat. It was a no-brainer when that one came up that we were the two who were going in. Any combination of my other three squad members simply didn't come close to being as good, as evidenced by their performance in the last Field Day.

But it was a new day, yes it was. On paper, we were solid. Now we just had to perform.

"Not Miss Pryde. Not Miss Pryde," I started chanting quietly to myself as we stood there waiting on our opponent. It was still loud enough for Hisako to hear, "-Not Miss Pryde."

"Why do you keep saying that?" Hisako asked me. She was just as anxious as I was from how she couldn't seem to stand still and kept bouncing on her toes while we waited, "There's no way they're going to make us fight our teacher."

"And you really think that matters to them?" I said, somewhat disagreeing with her, "The headmistress and Miss Pryde have beef, remember?"

I wouldn't have put it past Miss Frost to stick us with our own teacher to fight, just this once, just to fuck with us. Do it and say it was randomly selected. 'Random' my incandescent ass.

Hisako seemed offended, "Of course. I've been on this team longer than you, remember?" She said before softening her stance, "...What's it over, by the way?"

Hell if I knew at the time, "Beats me. It seems like one of those things that go so far back, asking about it would only piss both of them off," It never came up, and I wasn't going to be the one to bring it up, "I just figured it wasn't worth it to mention, because it wouldn't change anything."

Hisako saw that as a good enough reason. Adults didn't like kids meddling in their affairs. It wasn't worth the headache to get involved, "Still, you're afraid of fighting Miss Pryde?" She said before leering at me with intent to tease, "Do you have the hots for her like Eddie does?"

That wasn't necessarily a bombshell, even if it was bad form to talk about that sort of thing amongst ourselves. The other day when he'd asked me to do something for him if my plan for our pre-Field Day team meeting didn't work, he'd asked me to try and get him some alone time with Miss Pryde, which was doable.

I had no idea what he thought was going to go down after he got it, but that wasn't my problem, especially since after we kicked ass during the solo events, I didn't have to do it anyway.

I gave Hisako a look. Did she think insinuating something like me wanting to hook up with someone bothered me? Hadn't she learned from watching me blatantly check out girls during Field Day opening ceremonies? I like women. A lot. I wasn't ten years old. There was no shame to my game.

"In the sense that I think she's fine, yes, but that's not the point," I said, taking the wind out of her sails, "How the fuck are we supposed to beat someone we can't hit?"

That was one of my combat nightmare. At least with other enemies, even if I couldn't hurt them, I could do something to at least slow them down. Miss Pryde could just phase through anything either of us threw at her.

I didn't care about hurting her. She could handle herself just fine. She was actually an X-Man. We weren't.

"By not necessarily trying to beat her? Just last the whole ten minutes?" Hisako ventured as a solution, "We're not supposed to win. We're supposed to be smart about how we deal with them."

"I want a perfect score though," I said, getting an exasperated sigh out of her. Screw that 'barely skating by' crap. Shoot for the stars! "If we can get a stoppage, we get ten sweet, delicious, hard-earned points."

"And if we get stopped, we get a zero," Hisako argued back, "A ten would make us, but a zero would fuck us. Don't fuck us," She warned.

Hisako had a point. A good point. A point too good for me to ignore and fly off the handle in this fight.

Stupid logic. Couldn't it just take a backseat for once while I was trying to make some goddamn progress? I wanted to go balls-to-the-wall.

In the end, I let it go. It just wasn't the day for Bellamy Marcher to make himself a big-time player. The team came first, "Fine. We'll play it safe. But if I see an opening, I'm taking it, and I expect backup."

To punctuate this, I held up my hand with the index and pinky fingers held up, the tips of the middle and ring fingers pinched to the thumb.

Hisako stared like I was committing some kind of war crime by holding it up, "What the hell is that?"

"It's our thing. Our team thing," Eddie and I had decided on it the night before. We were both excited to use it as much as possible. We already had, three times before we split up for the competitions, "Come on, Hisako. Give it a tap."

She regarded it, then me, with all of the distaste of someone who was too good for what was going on, "You would have to laser my hand off and fix it like that to get me to do it."

I had no idea why she had to be so serious all of the time. It couldn't have been a fun way to live, "You're just exaggerating. Come on. 'Too sweet' me."

The depth of the frown on her face was borderline hilarious. I didn't think a human being could squint at another any harder, "Absolutely not."

"It's a show of solidarity. It says, 'I believe in you, do you believe in me?'" That had been my trump card, and she didn't buy what I was selling for a moment, "…Okay, I just think it looks cool. Do it," I demanded.

"Not a chance," She said, mentally digging herself in for my siege of requests.

Stubborn wench. This would only be as cool as she helped Eddie and I sell it to be. I needed the 'too sweet' to be a thing. My end goal was to have kids all over the school doing it by the end of the semester.

"Please?" I finally begged, "You know you want to."

She hesitated forever, leaving me hanging for the longest time. Eventually, she got tired of my hand hovering just out of reach and returned the gesture. I laughed as she humored me.

She blew her long black locks out of her face in a huff, "There. At least no one else saw it," I promptly pointed at one of the camera drones circling the room, contradicting her. Everyone saw it. She yelled at me in what I could only assume were Japanese swears, topped off with a satisfying-, "To hell with you, Bellamy!"

The doors to the Danger Room opened and a man with auburn hair and a full black bodysuit with a pink chest plate underneath an open brown trench coat walked in. His eyes were an odd combination of solid black with red pupils.

"Nice to see dat you kids look all warmed up," He said with a distinct Cajun accent as he walked up to us, "Both of you gonna need it."

Remy LeBeau, a.k.a. Gambit.

Hisako and I looked at each other to make sure we were both on the same page. Really, no matter who we wound up drawing for this fight, it was never going to be easy.

I took a step forward just as the clock began starting to tick down from ten minutes. He hadn't started jumping us yet, so perhaps this could kill a few seconds, "So... do you know what we can do?" Gambit nodded, the calm, easy smile on his face never going away, "Alright, that makes asking this next question easier. What do you do?"

"It's a lot'o fancy, scientific explanation to get to the whole thing," He said, with an errant wave of his hand, "Basically... Remy makes things go 'boom'." With that, a playing card slipped from his sleeve into his hand. After a moment it seemed to be brimming from all edges with raw energy.

I didn't like the sound of that, or the looks of it.

Hisako looked around at the plain, regular features of the Danger Room, "So... are they going to turn the room into something?" She asked curiously. Again, that itch came up at the back of my mind. It was annoying! I needed to focus. Whatever was touching at my thoughts could wait. A fight was a'brewing, "It feels kind of blank in here."

Gambit chuckled, "Nah. No tricks, much as Remy be a fan of a good sleight a' hand," He said, "This test is just a question of can you go? As in, fight?"

I saw his body tense up. We weren't going to get any more time out of him. Thirty seconds was going to have to be enough, "Well when you put it that wa-," I shot at him before I finished my sentence. Gambit dodged to the side, in the direction that Hisako took off in to intercept him, armoring up as she did. Gambit got a clear view of me and threw the charged-up card in his hand right at me. Hisako saw where he was aiming and moved between the two of us, intercepting it.

"You need something a little tougher to hurt me," She said, balling a large armored fist to swing at him.

"Dat shot wasn't meant for you," Gambit dodged with some weird, ninja/parkour kind of agility. I tried to move around from a distance to try and get a good shot at him, but from how Hisako was barreling ahead to get a decent swing at him, I couldn't track him well enough to do so, "On the other hand, this one though..."

From inside his coat, he pulled out a collapsible bo staff and smacked Hisako in the armored right knee, bringing her down to a kneel.

"Corner pocket, no?" He said before jabbing her right in the chest, sending her flying back. I was floored.

In addition to the fact that he didn't look nearly strong enough to do anything like that to an armored Hisako, it was how easy he made it look. He swatted her leg like he was trying to punish her for something instead of hurt her. And he poked her like he was taking a shot with a pool cue.

He turned his eyes to me and grinned. I began pumping as much power to my legs as I could in short order. With hardly any visual warning whatsoever, more cards appeared in his free hand that he threw my way. In that time frame I had gotten enough energy going to jump from where I had been standing clear over Gambit to land between him and Hisako as she got back up.

The shot I fired flew past him, barely missing but taking him out of whatever he was about to do next, "Whoo!" He exclaimed, taking a moment to regain his proper footing. We were at a standoff after a quick round of action, "Didn't think you was that fast, homme."

"You alright, Armor?" I asked as Hisako got up as quickly as she could.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Didn't hurt," She said, standing ready to fight once again, "It was more embarrassing than anything else."

Gambit chuckled and gesture to us to bring it on, "Get used to that."

I shot at the ground directly in front of us, kicking up a momentary cloud of smoke. With Gambit's eyes off of us for a moment, I turned around and stepped on a platform of Hisako's armored hands. She sent me flying up to the ceiling where I landed and jumped off, taking aim at Gambit. He saw me coming and jumped out of the way. I rolled through the landing and twisted to my belly where I fired an extended blast at him, following him around the room, slowly catching up to him.

He saw my blast closing in and backflipped over it just as the beam was closing in. Hisako kept up with how he was moving all the way and jumped into the air to shoulder-check him. He turned in the air and tried to block with his staff. It hardly helped. Hisako still smacked him away. Credit to him, he recovered well, flipping through with the blow and landing feet-first on the wall to cushion the force and drop to the floor.

The man knew his acrobatics. I made a note to try and remember that trick. I could pull moves like that when I was charged up. I just had to practice to learn how.

It would have to wait though. From where he landed, he judged the distance between Hisako and I, then gauged his chances at taking on one of us or the other. He clearly thought his chances of taking me down first were better, for good reason, because he charged me.

Hisako reached for him and tried to slow him down, but he was still quicker than her. He made it past her and bombarded me with cards. I tried to dodge a few, but the force of the missed blasts knocked me around. Instead, I started picking them off out of midair, causing them to detonate prematurely. Gambit used his own covering fire to finally get close enough to me to start in with hand-to-hand combat.

Both hands on his bo staff, he took a swing at me. I ducked, but he used the back end of the weapon to hit me in the head. The pole smacked me vertically, right down the center of my face. My nose burned in pain. I fell down right on my butt.

Through the tears welling up in my eyes, I saw enough of him to kick forward at him from the floor. He stopped it cold with his staff, "Ah-ah-ah," Gambit chided with a wag of his finger.

Screw that. No one was going to taunt me and just get away with it. My palms were still on the floor, so I let off a blast that lifted me off of the floor, pushing me in Gambit's direction. My foot was still on his staff. He went stumbling back to where Hisako was charging his way, coming to back me up. He turned his head and saw her coming, pivoting his body out of the way to send my momentum flying in her direction.

As I flew past, he let a card go that exploded against my back. It sent me spinning out of control until I found myself nestled in the merciful, red, psionically-armored bosom of my teammate, "Sol! Are you alright?"

He hit me right between the shoulder blades. I couldn't even reach back there to touch at the burning feeling to get some relief, "Gah! That fucking hurt! Is it bad?"

She hesitated to answer at first, "Uh…" She saw Gambit coming right at us and set me down so we could both deal with him, "Well, get him back!"

I steadied myself and fired two blasts on opposite sides of Gambit before swinging them both inward to trap him. He ducked both beams and kept coming at us again, closing the distance quicker than my wounded body would have liked.

Hisako stuck close behind me, so when Gambit went to hit me with his staff again, she was able to block it with her armored arm. I swung myself off of her protective limb and kicked Gambit in the side of the head. He got an arm up to protect himself, but I felt my leg make contact with skull.

I was so happy when I felt his body give under the force of the kick, but it was short-lived.

Gambit's power was molecular acceleration, and yes, it's just as cool as it sounds. Basically, for inanimate objects, he can take its stored potential energy and turn it to kinetic energy. Since that isn't ever supposed to happen, the object blows up.

Why am I explaining this? Well, when his staff shot was blocked by Hisako, the sly bastard reached down to touch the floor. That explained why my kick landed so cleanly. In other words, the metal floor panel we had all been standing on, he charged it. And when I kicked him, I knocked him away to a safe distance, so he wouldn't be near us when it exploded.

...Stupid, lucky, Cajun dickhead.

*BOOM!*

Thank God for two things. One, that Hisako had been armored up, because she might have had pieces of her missing if that hadn't been her mutant power. Two, that I had super solar powers that enhanced my body's abilities, because regular old squishy Bellamy would have been painting the Danger Room with his guts otherwise. He had to know our powers could endure that if he was willing to pull that move.

Even with the latter, Hisako's armor had taken most of the blast. I knew this for certain, because I was stuck underneath her afterwards, my ears ringing as I was pinned by a Japanese girl with big, transparent armor. Not as cool as it sounded.

"Hisako, if you're not as deaf as I am and you can hear me, please get off," I said, groaning in pain as I tried to push her off from a position with no leverage. Her armor had actual mass to it, "Seriously, you're kind of crushing me here."

Gambit, ever the asshole, took that moment to stand on top of Hisako's armored form and pointed down with his staff, "Good try, kids. But, bang-."

He didn't expect two beams of light to fire through Hisako's armor and blow him away. The explosion was fantastic, as was the sight of his body flopping off of the floor like a dead fish. Does it make me a bad person that I enjoyed that?

Nah. He was gloating instead of finishing us off. He deserved it.

I took a moment to relax, there on my back, Hisako on top of me, muttering something about her head. The cold floor felt so good against my burning back. I just wanted to keep lying down.

Only it wasn't over yet. Gambit was getting up. He was getting up slowly, but he was getting up nonetheless.

"Damn it," I muttered as Hisako's armored fomr finally got up off of me. That little surprise play had been our trump card. Our biggest ace in the hole. My blasts by themselves were pure light. Light went right through Hisako's armor, which sucked for her when we discovered it while we were sparring, because I hit her dead center the first time it happened. What was great though, was that we learned I could shoot other things through the armor.

It was a shock tactic. A desperation move. It wasn't something that we just did whenever, because it would only work like that once. And since it didn't put Gambit down, it was wasted.

I spared a look at the clock. I had no clue how long we were all down for, but the clock was right at three minutes.

Hisako looked back down at me and cringed. She could guess how much her landing on me probably hurt, even knowing how sturdy I was, "Can you stand up? Are you good to keep going?"

I waved off her attempt to help me up. It was better to worry about herself for the time being. She'd had her armor up for a while ever since the fight had started. She couldn't maintain it forever, especially taking the kind of beating she had, "I kind of have to be. We've got three minutes left to go, and he's not gonna stop. Especially not after that," If he wasn't badly injured, he was probably pretty upset, "How are you doing?"

I could see the sweat on her brow, and the clamminess of her skin. It wasn't because this was a hard fight, "I'll last," She told me.

A frown spread across my face and I gave her a shove. She of course hardly budged, "Don't lie. If you're feeling tired, armor down," I said, "I can deal with him by myself long enough to give you a breather."

She glared at me, but she armored down. The need to rest overtook the desire to hang tough, "You're out of your mind. He's been handing you your ass every time he's gotten close."

This I knew, which was why I didn't plan on getting close again. I planned on ending things then and there.

I put my hands together, palm-to-palm and felt them stick, the heat from the energy I was generating growing between them. Something was happening. I had no idea what. When I was experimenting with my powers, I was always afraid to see, "Do you trust me?" I asked.

Hisako hesitated. Hard, "…" I pulled the palms of my hands away to look inside the pocket and saw a little ball of light. It didn't help convince her. She could feel the raw energy building. Even I knew anyone else around me could feel it, "..."

"It's a yes or no question!" I snapped at her, "Answer, please!"

She snapped out of her deep thought and took a few steps back for safety, not that I could blame her, "You don't just say something like that when we're doing something this dangerous and you're holding something like that."

There was a solid ball building at the center of my hands, and it was heavy. The wider I parted my hands with my fingers locked, the bigger it got, the faster it started to spin, the louder it started to hum.

"What is that?" She said warily. Again, I couldn't blame her. I was scared too. This was the longest I had ever held this. I'd always wussed out before it got this far.

"I don't know," I said, slowly moving forward, carefully keeping my hands in that position. It felt like if I let my fingers loose, something would happen. Whatever that something was, I hoped it was good, because Gambit was up, and looked ready to blow me up before I did it to him first.

He had two fists full of cards, both eyes locked on me. I had the distinct impression that he didn't like me at all, "No way Gambit's lettin' you throw dat lil' death ball."

"It's not a death ball," I said, offended. I had to say it louder than normal though, because the hum from the light ball was steadily getting louder, "...Okay, it might be a death ball."

"Mm-hmm," Gambit cocked his arms back to throw. I flinched and hoped the stream of consciousness that flowed from my mouth made enough sense to give me a chance.

"Dude, if you pick me off, it's gonna blow the fuck up," I quickly sputtered out, getting him to stop for a moment. I had to make the most of it, "You hear that? Skin contact with me is the only thing keeping this thing stable, and I'm pretty sure no one in the room is getting away from it when it goes."

I had no idea what this thing was going to do, but it felt like it was going to explode, and nothing that exploded and made loud sounds beforehand to this degree ever exploded lightly.

"You included?" Gambit said, trying to talk me down from today's bout of mutually assured destruction.

Smooth talking S.O.B. almost made me second guess myself for a moment, "...That may not have accounted into my plans," I admitted. Why did I admit that out loud?

"You had a plan?" Thank you, Hisako.

"Shut up, girl," I hissed back to her before turning my attention back to the actual threat, "So! Mister... Gambit, or LeBeau... or whatever the fuck you want to be called by students. You have thirty seconds to give up, or I am going to blow all of our asses to – best case, a hospital bed. Worst case, Heaven, Hell, Valhalla, Purgatory, Shangri-la, or whatever alternate plane of existence floats your particular boat."

Gambit scoffed, "You wouldn't."

He might have been right, had he not said those particular words in that order. Telling me I wouldn't or couldn't do something was the worst possible way to try and get me to not do it.

"Armor'll be fine," I said, sounding confident in Hisako's chances of walking away, "Both of us need to be taken out to get a zero, but if we put you down, it doesn't matter how we do it, or if one of us goes down in the process, we still get a 10."

Those were the rules. Good for us. One of us, at least. It was going to be bad for me. That much I knew, and I was willing to accept that.

"You willin' to bet with your life like that, homme?" Gambit asked.

There wasn't really any turning back at this point. Besides, it wasn't like I could just make the ball go away. It was there, so I might as well have used it, "I'll tell you what; we are all about to find out in ten seconds."

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Hisako ventured to ask again. She thought I was bluffing. I was not.

"Not even a little bit," I told her, "Armor up."

She would be fine. If she could take Gambit's big explosion that he tried on us without a scratch on her, she could handle whatever this would be. If I could just get between her and the direction of the blast, I had a chance to not completely get a face full of hot blast shockwave.

"Sol, I don't think-."

"-Hisako, your opinion is duly noted. Now armor the fuck up!"

In any less serious circumstance, yelling at her like that would have caused her to do about as close to the exact opposite of what I said as was reasonably, healthily possible. Whether she did so on this occasion because I said so, or because she was willing to err on the side of caution, it didn't matter. The moment I saw the red of her psionic protective suit go up, I was prepared to let my fingers separate. The ball of light was vibrating so hard, my hands were going numb. It wanted to be fired.

Gambit did not want it to be fired, with all of three seconds to spare.

"Alright, Remy surrenders," He said, putting his hands up, flicking his charged cards to the ceiling to explode harmlessly, "Dis ain't worth getting blown to bits over," He said somewhat ironically as bits of playing cards drifted down from the air, "You look just young and dumb enough to do it."

I wasn't taking him at his base word, "Say it out loud! I need it confirmed."

"Remy surrenders!"

Hisako armored down and let out the biggest sigh of relief I had ever heard from her. I was busy stomping the floor victoriously, "You heard the man! Give me my ten goddamn points!"

I was a little too loud for my teammate's tastes. Even the glow of victory wasn't enough to mellow Hisako out to the extent that she would get off of my back, "You know that would never work again in a million years," She chided me, but she was grinning wider than I'd ever seen her.

Actually, she could have it. I didn't bother arguing. There was no need. We finally got a ten. It didn't matter to me how we got it, "Don't need it to, Hisako. Don't need it to."

She shook her head, but also decided to just let it go. Besides, there was still something pretty important going on, and it was in my hands, "...What are you going to do with that now?" She asked, remembering the potentially very destructive object I had in my hands.

"I would re-absorb dat if I was you," Gambit advised, moving closer and closer to the door that was still shut tight. We must not have been the only ones wondering what to do with the light ball.

Thank you, captain obvious. If I knew how to do that, I would have by then. I didn't really need it anymore, did I?

"Um," By then, my hands had definitely gone numb. That couldn't have been a good sign about how much energy the ball had sucked out of me. "I'm scared to hold on, but I'm scared to let go," What color were my eyes by the way? "Hey, if I just stood all the way by the door and pointed it at the back wall, do you think-?"

"NO!"

I didn't need both of them to yell it at me. I would have gotten the message from just one.