"Again."

  An automatic command code for the three of them. Over the last three weeks, the challenge had been the sole passing of time inside Facility B.

  Thwack.

  Damian pushed the ball out to the pin, his sets having regained a crisp consistency now that his body had adapted to the insane volume of the training.

  Kevin launched. Himeko rose.

  Kevin snapped his wrist, playing for a sharp cross. Himeko's hands were there instantly. The ball slammed into her palms, but the angle wasn't perfectly square. Ends up ricocheted off her thumbs, spiraling sideways to crash into the ball cart near the bench.

  Kevin landed, wiping sweat from his brow.

  He looked at Himeko who was looking at her hands, flexing them once to recalibrate the angle of her wrists, her face a mask of calm calculation.

  It was starting to get inside his head. Every time he went up, the window of opportunity was smaller. The "open court" he was famous for finding was shrinking that got obstructed the moment he tried to use them.

  He caught the ball Damian tossed back to him. He looked across the net at the Iron Maiden.

  Not if, Kevin realized. But when.

  "You know," Kevin said, breaking the silence as he walked back to the service line. He bounced the ball once, keeping his tone light to mask the mounting pressure he felt. "I heard 'The Barn' is doing a late-night pop-up downtown. Best smash burgers in the city. Fries cooked in beef tallow. How about tonight we go? My treat."

  Himeko stood at the net, stomping her shoes against the floor to ensure a tight fit. She didn't look up immediately, but the corner of her mouth twitched downward in a micromovement of distaste.

  "Hard pass."

  "Come on," Kevin groaned. "You can't survive on rice balls alone. You need flavor, Nakamura. Grease!"

  "Fast food makes me feel sluggish. It would undo everything we have done."

  Kevin shook his head. "You are no fun."

  Damian pointed at himself, his eyes pleading like a puppy. "I could use a good smash burger tonight."

  "You are on your own, buddy."

  The banter died as quickly as it had begun, Kevin's easy smile faded from his face. He stepped up to the line. The air in the gym seemed to tighten, the anticipation reaching its peak.

  Himeko lowered into her stance. Her eyes funneled into the point ahead.

  "Ready," she said.

  The ball left Kevin's hand, a high, floating toss that signaled the start of the sequence. But immediately, the rhythm broke.

  Damian didn't plant his feet in his usual spot. He drifted aggressively to the left, his body language screaming a set to the outside pin. Simultaneously, Kevin cut hard behind him, his upper body dipping low as if driving for a back-row attack - a kaleidoscope of motion, a chaotic, high-speed trap designed to overload the visual cortex of any blocker, forcing a split-second hesitation that would be fatal.

  Himeko's brain should have been screaming. It should have been frantically calculating angles, processing the visual noise, and panicking at by the sudden deviation from their weeks of routine.

  Instead, the entire world went quiet.

  The harsh squeak of sneakers against rubber vanished. The sounds of balls across the facility faded into nothingness.

  A profound stillness washed over her. It was as if the hardwood floor beneath her feet had dissolved, transforming into this glassy, obsidian surface of a moonlit lake. The urgency that had driven her for weeks, the disdan of the 'useless' gold medal, the fear of inadequacy, the desperate, clawing need to win, it all simply did not exist.

  Himeko felt weightless, if true freedom.

  Within this crystalline silence, the chaos across the net unraveled into a simple, legible script.

  She saw the dip of Kevin's left shoulder: an obvious lie meant to sell the back-row attack. She saw the twitch of Damian's ring finger, a silent telegraph to his captain. And finally, she saw the truth: of Kevin's right heel, digging into the floor, loading the tension to fake the forward motion, only to explode in the opposite direction.

  There. Himeko's mind became crystal clear.

  Kevin launched himself. He pivoted, abandoning the fake to sprint toward the right pin, expecting to leave a confused blocker stumbling in his wake.

  But as he moved, a shadow moved with him.

  She glided across the surface of her mental lake, fluid and effortless, as if she were being pulled by the same invisible thread that guided Kevin.

  Damian released the ball, a lightning-fast shoot set to the right.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  As the ball left his fingertips, Damian's eyes widened in genuine horror having realized he had set directly into a silhouette that had arrived at the destination before the ball did.

  Kevin saw it too. As he planted his feet for takeoff, his heart skipped a beat. The open court he had engineered with the complex trap wasn't there. Himeko was already waiting, her posture serene, her eyes were clear and empty of fear.

  The trap had snapped shut, but the hunter was the one caught inside. There was no time to abort, no time to reset. The ball was in the air. Kevin had to fly.

  Kevin planted his feet, and for the first time in his career, the floor felt like quicksand; his legs, usually springs of limitless energy, felt heavy, burdened by the ertainty that the moment he left the earth, the shadow waiting above would swallow him whole.

  He couldn't jump on tempo. Tempo was death.

  With an unnatural pivot on his lead foot, Kevin shattered the designated fate. He delayed his takeoff by a heartbeat, a stutter in time made to throw off the universe, before exploding upward. He coiled, launching himself into an impossible, corkscrewing contortion, turning his left shoulder in toward the net to delay his arm swing until the absolute last millisecond of existence.

  The ball hung in the air, a spinning yellow-and-blue planet suspended in a gravity-less void. It rotated in agonizingly slow motion, the seams visible, ticking down the lifespan of the play.

  Simultaneously, Himeko's arms swept back like the wings of a great bird. She loaded her hips and ascended.

  For a second that stretched into an eternity, physics surrendered to will.

  Two figures hung suspended in the rafters, caught in this beautiful air ballet. Time seemed to stop completely, holding its breath to witness the collision of two unyielding spirits.

  Kevin reached the apex of his contorted leap. He looked through the net, searching for the light.

  Found only despair.

  Himeko's eyes were wide, luminous, and completely communicated that he had ben caught. Her arms were extended in a perfect roof, her fingers splayed wide to seal the heavens. Her shoulders squared, core tight, invading his space like an inevitable tsunami.

  She has it. It's over.

  But Kevin Marvant was the MVP for a reason. "He who rewrote the inevitable," summoning an immediate burst of swirling power from his core, he uncoiled. Pushing his wrist to a snapping point of anatomical limits, he rotated his hand inward at an extreme angle aiming for the phantom space to Himeko's extreme left - a cut shot so sharp it rewrote geometry, seeking the complexity of threads cutting that only the best of bests can conquer.

  As Kevin's arm whipped forward in that chaotic arc, his eyes flicked from the spinning ball to the obstacle in his path.

  Himeko's face cast completely in shadow, darkened by an overwhelming aura of dominance. The only features piercing through the gloom were a pair of eyes that burned with a wicked delight, and a widened white grin. It was as if he was staring at the Grim Reaper swinging The Scythe.

  With a flick of her wrist, Himeko snapped her left hand outward to fill the void.

  BAM.

  The ball ricocheted off her palm, burying itself instantly into the floor on Kevin's side of the court.

  Bop.

  Bop. Bop.

  Bop. Bop. Bop. Bop. Bop. Bop.

  Kevin landed hard, his sneakers screeching against the varnish. He stumbled back a step, his chest heaving, the adrenaline roaring in his ears like a jet engine.

  He slowly turned his head to look behind him.

  The ball lay still on the wood, innocent and dead.

  He slowly turned back to the net.

  Himeko was standing there, staring at her own open palms. She turned them over, examining the red sting on her skin, flexing her fingers slowly. She looked bewildered, entranced, as if those hands belonged to someone else. Her mind raced to catch up to the miracle her body had just performed.

  Then, she looked up.

  She met Damian's slack-jawed gaze, and then locked eyes with Kevin.

  Slowly, the bewilderment melted away. A smile broke across her face.

  It was a brilliant, genuine, ear-to-ear smile. A blinding, unfiltered explosion of joy. It was the most honest, radiant expression either man had ever seen from the Iron Maiden.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, inhaling deeply, centering herself, letting the joy of the breakthrough settled. When she opened her eyes again, the smile remained, but the fire was back.

  She dropped into her crouch.

  "Again."