The rest of the day went by easily, most people clear F's or C’s, and no one qualified for mandatory military service. It seemed to annoy the Administrator quite a bit, but honestly, the worst any of us would get would be a more unsubtle nudge toward being less lenient in our grading.

  We had to go see Joelle next, but we had a bit of extra time to kill since travel would be instant.

  The two of us walked out of the square building we had been cooped up in, I was shielding my eyes from the light as I saw the sweeping city out in front of me. I caught a moment of surreality when my adrenaline finally faded, and I had a second to think about everything. To see a destroyed world sitting perfectly fine in front of my eyes.

  I managed to get out of hell. It took me doing something horrible, but I did it. I won.

  My head only cleared when Elenor hit me in the side, smirking as she walked in front of me to sign. “Daydreaming?”

  “A little. Hey, weird question, can I give you a hug?”

  She quirked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. There were interesting moments when talking in sign language, where you didn’t actually need to use the new dictionary of words because the gestures used were ones you already knew. In this case, she pointed to me, then lifted her thumbs up with a questioning look. “You Ok?”

  It was enough to almost convince me to just tell her absolutely everything then and there. But I kept myself from saying anything just yet. I need to gain my bearings more, I can’t deny that telling someone and getting a sort of team together who I trust implicitly would be the ideal way to make progress, but I need to make those decisions rationally, not on sheer impulse and emotions. “Yeah…Yeah, I’m…I’m great.”

  She moved in, and I wrapped my arms around her back. I let out a deep sigh against her, eyes closed for a moment as I let myself relax against her. It was grounding in a lot of ways, to feel someone's arms wrapped around me, to know that she didn’t hate me with a passion. “Thanks.”

  We parted and she just gave me a pat on the back, nodding at me. She made a gesture that was a little bit nonsense to anyone but the two of us. She pointed to her forehead then up, her sign for Joelle.

  “Yeah, we should see her now.” I slipped my hands into my pockets, realizing I was way out of uniform with the clothes I had thrown on during my manic episode. Grey sweatpants and a collared shirt.

  She was going to yell at me about that. Well, bigger things are at stake here. “Take us away.”

  She placed a hand on my shoulder and the two of us teleported

  Teleportation was incredibly disorienting. How the hell Elenor did it as fast and often as she did was crazy to me. I did something similar, but mine had easy cushions for most of the sharp edges. The way your eyes have to adapt to an entirely new stimulus that changes in a literal instant, the movement instantaneous and faster than light by that definition. As far as I understood it, we didn’t move there, so much as just appear. It was also a little like getting off of a plane with rapid atmospheric adjustment.

  I shook my head, opening my eyes, which I had closed in preparation for the rapid change in scenery. We were right outside an office, deep inside Svalinn, the world's largest and most secure military base focusing on powered individuals. It had the most advanced tech in the world, some of it powered by the supernatural abilities we all had. Some of it was just made by the smartest person alive.

  The whole place felt alive in some way, electricity thrumming like blood, wires veins, and us the little white cells bobbing around. This was where we lived, where we trained, where we gained intelligence and we mourned the dead.

  I opened the door to Jollen’s office and found it empty. I closed the door, glancing at Elenor, who shrugged.

  We both got a text about the same time, checking our phones and seeing a message from her. “Not in my office today, there are reports of Yokai-level monsters around the border of the king's shell. Check it out, exterminate what you run into, and ignore what isn’t relevant. I’ll message you the location of the reports being sent in, go ahead and ”

  I glanced at Elenor who sighed, then signed. Yokai, for us, was her flicking her hand forward like she was swatting a fly. Then, “Boring.”

  In response, I lifted my hand up and crooked my pointer finger. “Need,” I spoke out as well. “Necessary evil.”

  “We’re better than this.”

  I huffed. “Even if we were, which I’m not so sure about, what else would we be doing? We get paid to work, not to look pretty until a problem arises. This is about stopping something before it can develop.” It was an ideology I’d have to take for myself.

  “They just do this because I can teleport.”

  “Yeah?” I started walking off, towards the armory. I needed my baby girl back in my hands. “You weren’t drafted, you knew what you were signing up for, hell I’m shocked they let you do anything except move people around.”

  She ran to get in front of me, turning around to keep signing. Forcing me to nudge her out of the way of people now and again, hands resting gently on her shoulders to maneuver her around. She didn’t even react, just letting me do so as she signed. “That's boring. I need some action, you know?”

  “Shut your hands, and we’ll get to the action.”

  It was her turn to flip me off, as I stopped the both of us in front of the armory doors.

  Steel and several feet thick and wide, more like a bank vault than a door stood in front of us, the two hydraulically powered door edges that pressed against each other when closed painted in yellow and black like a yellowjacket advertising its own stinger. The paint is chipped and peeling from overuse and a lack of time or care to apply new ones. Everyone already knew not to stand in it while it was closing, that, or they weren’t aware enough to be someone worth keeping in the military force.

  I fished around for my keycard, not quite sure where it was. “Uh, Ellanor could you?”

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  She moved in front of me and swiped hers, before looking at me from the side, a small smile on her face and her eyebrow softly upturned, laughing at me silently.

  The massive doors opened slowly, and with a light hiss, parting for the two of us and slamming shut quickly behind us. We made our way to a joint locker, Powered Unit 3 written on the top, and etched out with scratchy knife marks. Graffitied overtop of it, like every other locker, was a different name. “Mutes.”

  She fetched a small case, a regular-looking combat knife pressed inside of it against black foam. I let out a fond sigh, as I saw my girl looking up at me, its barrel like a single eye as it sat on a little stand keeping it propped up.

  It was a weird little thing as far as weapons went, single-barreled and only chambering one single large bullet, with no feeding mechanism. Like I said, it was made for me. Something like a revolver with one large enclosed area where the rotating chamber should be. The bullet was a single .50, and the force of the bullet should theoretically dislocate my shoulder and break the entire thing each time I use it. It does actually dislocate my shoulder each time, I just fix it instantly. The thing would be useless in anyone else's hands, but in mine, it’s almost the entire reason I’m strong at all in a fight.

  The thing is a bitch to use and hurts like hell, but I got used to it. All I have to do is fire it and reverse my and it’s time instantly to the moment before I fired. Once I got the movement down to muscle memory, my pain receptors barely even really had time to register that I was hurt. They still did, I wasn’t that fast, but, it didn’t last long.

  I felt calm almost instantly as I held onto it, exhaling deeply. I admit that thanks to my time spent at the end of the world with it on my hip, I may have formed an unhealthy attachment to this thing.

  I grab the small cowboy-style holster that came with it, leather hooked to keep the gun down and out of anyone else's grip, not that they could use it, but if they broke it past the point I could fix it I’d probably cry.

  “Ready?”

  Elenor threw her knife into a similar sheath on her hip and nodded, before gesturing towards our body armor and vests. “Really? When was the last time we actually brought these? They’re sorta pointless.”

  “We’ll be in public. Keep appearances.”

  I let out a low groan, before glancing down at my sweatpants. “Fine.”

  We switched into our gear properly, all decked out in black vests and tactical gear. “Right, how far are you feeling capable of?”

  Since the population of the world was still as large as it was, her ability to teleport was severely limited in comparison to what it was at the end of times. Right now, if my memory was correct, it was a distance of about a couple hundred miles. We’d need to make a few trips to get where we need to be.

  She placed a hand on my shoulder, and we made the first jump, suddenly and without explanation an immense distance away. I opened my eyes to see the open and destroyed highway, a few scarce wrecked cars lining the sides of the roads.

  I placed my hands in my pockets, fished my phone out, used the compass app to point me south, and started walking. Elenor fell into step behind me. Making a few odd facial expressions as she dealt with the side effects of using her powers. They were things that couldn’t be pinned down, and that any individual seemed to utterly fail to relate to with another person. Unique to us, in a way that only the person experiencing it could comprehend.

  We were somewhere in what used to be Alabama, or Georgia maybe. I only had my teenage years to experience a nation that had states in it, and I hadn’t taken to memorizing them with as much zeal as my old teachers would’ve liked. The age of a hundred thousand little fractured powers and peoples all clashing and intermingling is somewhat shattered now.

  The shards remain, of course, the prayers, the hundreds of different gods and beliefs all co-mingle, now out of necessity more than tolerance. The value of land has been shifted, and only areas that have no coasts are valuable and defendable. The closer you got to the sea, the closer you got to death.

  However, a dangerous setting has never in the history of humanity, inspired anything but determination to adapt. People still live in the ruins of cities long abandoned by the remaining federal governmental power here. Civilizations of their own in some ways, adapting their own isolated pieces of language and culture. It wasn’t like they had a particular amount of power or even established and organized groups outside of ones too minor to be considered players in a global game.

  Mostly, the relationship they had to the still connected parts of civilization that exist in our continent, was just this. Reporting weird shit and having some people with updated tech and information on abilities come check it out.

  In all honestly, we don’t hear from them often, most of the time they just deal with their own issues.

  I was wrecking my head trying to remember if I had done this particular thing before, but honestly, this sort of thing was most of what Elenor and I did. Thanks to her powers, we could be there and back within a day or two, making us the quickest form of spreading information so long as the internet gave out the way it does once in the territory of the sea.

  Elenor reached out to grab my shoulder, and I closed my eyes, as we jumped once more to another place.

  This time, we could see the King in the distance, his shell the only distant mountain in the flat area of what was once Georgia. A creature so big it shouldn’t exist should be unable to hold its own weight upon its eerily massive body. The tips of it’s spiked shell poking up into the sky just above the horizon line, all the buildings that would’ve stood in the way of its might kneeling to it, their heads digging into the ground as a shattered base remains looking upwards.

  We were now in the domain of the king.

  An alligator snapping turtle the size of a mountain range, that had eaten most of Florida, and was now resting in a hibernation-like slumber. Though whispers were spoken of its long death, of how it couldn’t possibly have eaten enough to not starve, and how it hadn’t moved in years.

  Still though, looking at that thing in the distance, seeing its body splayed against the horizon, coming more and more into view as we get closer and closer. It seems impossible that such a thing is dead, that it died on its own.

  The current plan is to keep watching it, and react if it ever moves.

  I, and the other five knew that it was already dead by this point. But that paranoia wasn’t unfounded.

  It’s a little funny. It doesn’t matter if that thing is dead, only that it might not be. And so long as it only might be dead, it isn’t worth checking and risking waking it up.

  Schrodinger's gigantic turtle.

  Elenor was getting a little woozy, so we took a quick break in the remains of a small town, more like a rest stop of the side of a highway. Fast food places with their brands and iconography dirtied and faded. Golden arches resting in pieces on the side of a building with a caved-in roof.

  Elenor sat on the side of the road, while I went and poked my head in, exploring the dilapidated building. There wasn’t much to find, and I knew that, but it was still entertaining to take a look behind the back of the place. Moving around the debris and broken building and looking at what pieces had been nailed down and weren’t scavenged.

  Old buildings like this always seemed to have ghosts, spirits, and impressions of people long past now. Graffiti that could be decades of years old in the bathroom, the way that loose pieces of paper with neat documentation on them had been left there, faded, wet, and almost a part of the floor with how long the two had spent pressed against each other.

  I left the back area, taking a seat in one of the remaining booths, looking out of the window that only had a shard or two of jagged glass, letting me see the overgrown parking lot empty of cars and full of grass and weeds.

  A deep breath came through me, as I closed my eyes. So long as we were headed this way, I may as well make a trip to kill the Monarch as well.