Novel Full Chapter 738: Yoga with Miss Brooks
Chapter 738: Yoga with Miss Brooks
Noah had been staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes.
Not because he couldn’t sleep. He had slept fine, better than he had in months actually, the Vanguard station’s quarters doing what good quarters did which was provide a bed and silence and leave the rest to the person using them. He was awake because his system had been sitting in his peripheral vision since he opened his eyes and he had been putting off looking at it the way you put off opening something when you already knew it was going to be a lot.
He opened it.
[PENDING NOTIFICATIONS: 14]
’Fourteen,’ he thought. ’Of course.’
He started from the top.
[QUEST COMPLETE: Hierarchy exists for a reason]
[Reward delivered: Biological Integration Stage 2]
[Draconic Halfling Stage 2: Active]
[Full profile updated. Review when ready.]
He pulled up the profile. Looked at the numbers. The HP, the void energy, the stats all sitting higher than before, the new passives listed out. He read through them once and then closed it because the numbers were numbers and he would sit with what they meant later.
[NEW TAB UNLOCKED: Soul Form]
He looked at that one for a while.
’So that was it,’ he thought. ’That was the thing I couldn’t do that everyone else could.’
He thought about Lucas going full electrical form in a fight, the boundary between him and the lightning around him dissolving until they were the same thing. Angel’s soul form multiplying everything she was by ten, the blood ability running at outputs that made her normal output look like a warm up. Lucas’s sister Lucy, the one time he had seen her cut loose properly, the air around her going wrong in every direction simultaneously.
Every alpha ranked awakened had one. S rank upward. It was the true version of what they were, the full expression of the power their body carried, and for years he had watched everyone around him access it and wondered why he couldn’t.
’It makes sense now,’ he thought. ’My powers were never conventional. I wasn’t born with void manipulation. I didn’t wake up one day and discover a latent ability. I almost died in a cave as a first gen, unlocked a system that shouldn’t exist, found a dragon egg, and have been completing quests and grinding stats ever since.’ He looked at the Soul Form tab. ’The normal rules never applied to me. Why would the soul form work the same way.’
He opened the tab.
[Soul Form: Draconic Halfling Stage 2]
[Classification: Biological Manifestation]
[Activation: Voluntary or triggered under extreme biological stress]
[Duration: Scales with current void energy reserves]
[Cooldown: 72 hours]
[Description: Full expression of Draconic Halfling biology. Physical parameters increase significantly across all attributes. Draconic features manifest externally. Void energy output amplified. Soul form is unique to the individual and cannot be replicated or borrowed.]
[Note: Further evolution of soul form tied to biological integration progress. Current manifestation is Stage 2 expression only.]
’Stage 2 expression only,’ he thought. ’So it gets stronger.’
He closed the system and looked at the ceiling again.
Jayden was dead.
He had known that from the moment he came out of the cocoon. He hadn’t seen it happen. Didn’t know the details yet. But he had looked at the battlefield and done the accounting that you did when you came back from somewhere and needed to know who didn’t come back with you, and Jayden’s name had come up on the wrong side of that accounting.
Kruel was responsible. He didn’t know exactly how but he knew enough about how that fight had gone to know that anything that happened on that battlefield with Kruel’s name attached to it was Kruel’s responsibility.
He would go back to his team soon. His original reason for coming to the Ark had been his parents and his parents weren’t there and that was a door he was going to have to figure out how to walk through eventually. But he had stumbled onto something else here. Something the system had flagged before he even knew what he was looking for.
An alpha dragon. Somewhere at the edge of his solar system. Sitting there for two years while his dragons in the domain went restless and he filed it under later.
Storm was on the floor beside the bed.
Not in the domain. Not summoned formally. Just there, the way Storm had been just there since Noah arrived on the station, appearing in the room the way he appeared everywhere, the question of how a dragon the size of a small aircraft navigated Vanguard station’s corridors without anyone officially sanctioning it being one that nobody had raised yet because raising it would require having a conversation about the answer with Noah and not many people in their right minds wanted to pick a fight with a guy who walked around with an overgrown, overly excited murder puppy.
Noah looked at him.
The puppy in question, Storm.
"What do you think an alpha dragon looks like," he said.
Storm lifted his head from the floor and looked at Noah with the patient intelligence of a creature that had opinions about most things and expressed them selectively.
Then he scooted sideways across the floor and put his head in Noah’s lap.
Noah looked down at him. "That’s not an answer."
Storm closed his eyes.
Noah reached into his void storage and pulled out a beast core, category four, and held it out. Storm opened one eye, assessed it, opened his mouth, and Noah dropped it in. The glow of it was visible for a second through the scales at his throat before it disappeared.
"You could go back to the domain," Noah said. "You’re being terrible company."
Storm stood up, walked to the bathroom, and put his head inside it, his body too large for the doorway, blocking the entrance entirely with his haunches.
Noah looked at the haunches blocking his bathroom.
"Is that you hiding from me? Don’t think I don’t see you. And besides, that’s my bathroom," he said.
Storm’s tail swept once across the room floor.
Noah got up, stepped over the tail, grabbed his jacket, and left.
---
The station ran its morning patterns around him as he walked. Soldiers moving between shifts, the smell of the cafeteria from somewhere on the level below, the particular hum of a facility that never fully went quiet. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes forward and people he passed did the thing they had been doing since he arrived, the double take, the straightening of posture, the careful decision about whether to say something or not.
Most of them decided not.
He walked through the observation corridor on the station’s eastern side where the viewport ran the full length of it, open space on the other side of the glass, Earth visible at the lower edge, the blue of it familiar in the way that things were familiar when they had been the backdrop of your entire life.
’Humanity,’ he thought, looking at it. ’Four cardinals, the Ark up here, the Vanguard station, the colonies, all of it built to survive something that keeps getting stronger.’ He looked at the planet. ’I wish I was born in a different era. Not because this one is bad. Just because I’d like to know what it felt like to look at that planet without immediately thinking about what was trying to destroy it.’
He stood at the viewport for a while.
’Different era, different problems,’ he thought. ’Probably. Still.’ He looked at Earth. ’Would have been nice.’
"You’re up early."
He turned.
Miss Brooks was coming down the observation corridor in the direction of the eastern gym, her hair down, which was different from every version of her he had seen on the station so far where it had been up or pulled back. She was carrying a rolled mat under one arm and a water bottle in her other hand and she was wearing training clothes that were not the standard issue kind.
"Couldn’t sleep?" she said.
"Slept fine," Noah said. "Storm is in my bathroom."
She looked at him. "Your dragon."
"He put his head in and his body was too wide for the doorway so now he’s just there."
She pressed her lips together in the way she pressed them together when something was funny and she was deciding whether the professional setting required her not to show that.
She showed it anyway. "Where are you headed."
"Nowhere specific," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she held up the rolled mat slightly. "You want to find out?"
---
The room she used was on the station’s lower level, a small space that wasn’t on any official facility map as a training room because it wasn’t a training room. It was a storage room that had been partially cleared at some point and never fully returned to storage use, the remaining crates pushed to the walls, the floor space in the center clean and wide enough for what she used it for.
She unrolled the mat and looked at Noah standing in the doorway.
"Ancient relaxation technique," she said. "Twenty first century. Called yoga."
Noah looked at the mat. "I know what yoga is."
"Do you."
"Roughly."
"Take your jacket off and come here," she said.
He took his jacket off and came there.
She moved through the first positions slowly, explaining as she went, the names of things, the breathing, the purpose behind each shape the body made. She was precise about it the way she was precise about everything, the instructor brain running even here, outside the classroom, outside the uniform.
Noah watched her move and tried to follow and his body, which had been doing things recently that the human body was not designed to do, expressed strong opinions about some of the positions.
"Here," she said, coming to stand beside him. She put her hand on his lower back and adjusted his posture and the adjustment was clinical and correct and Noah’s internal commentary about it was neither of those things.
’Stop,’ he told himself.
She moved his shoulder with two fingers, realigning the position.
’She’s your instructor,’ he thought. ’Former instructor. Current commander. There is a very clear professional context here.’
She stepped in front of him to demonstrate the next position and bent forward slowly with the kind of control that came from years of practice and Noah looked at the line of her back and the way the skin tight training clothes did exactly what skin tight training clothes did and he looked at the wall instead.
’The wall is good,’ he thought. ’The wall is excellent. The wall has nothing going on.’
"You’re not watching," she said, without turning around.
"I’m watching," he said.
"Your form says otherwise."
She came back upright and turned and looked at him with the assessment she gave students who were not paying sufficient attention and he held eye contact.
She almost smiled.
They worked through the sequence for forty minutes. Some of it he found surprisingly difficult, the balance requirements asking things of a body that had been built recently for entirely different purposes, and she corrected him each time with hands that were matter of fact about it in a way that his brain was not fully cooperating with.
Not to mention that being in close proximity to a woman with such physical features as Miss Brooks in such a tight outfit made it inherently difficult to concentrate.
Miss Brooks was still the same woman, ever voluptuous teacher and age struggled to keep up with her because it appeared she’d found the fountain of youth and dried the whole stream.
’The sight of her brings back pleasant memories,’ Noah allowed himself to think.
By the end he was sitting on the floor with his back straight and his eyes closed because she had said close your eyes and breathe and he was doing that, the station quiet around them, the hum of it somewhere below the level of attention.
"You miss the academy," she said. Not a question.
He opened his eyes. "Sometimes."
"What do you miss."
He thought about it honestly. "The routine of it. Knowing what the day looked like before it started. Having a problem set in front of you that had a defined solution." He looked at the cleared floor space. "Everything since then has been problems without defined solutions."
"That’s just life," she said.
"Yeah," he said. "I know. Doesn’t mean I can’t miss the other version."
She looked at him. "You grew up fast."
"I grew up necessary," he said. "That’s different."
She held his gaze for a moment with something in her expression that wasn’t professional and wasn’t unprofessional, just human, just a person looking at another person and seeing something real there.
Then from outside the room, through the corridor, the sound of the station changed.
A ship landing. The docking bay two levels up, the thud of it traveling through the structure, followed by the organized noise of a bay receiving a vessel and the people in it.
Brooks stood up and picked up her mat. "Come on," she said.
---
The docking bay had a small crowd by the time they arrived. Not the kind of crowd that formed for the Supreme General or for Noah. The kind that formed when a team came back from somewhere and the people who knew them wanted to see them walk off the ship.
Five of them came down the ramp.
Five of them came down the ramp and they were not quiet about it.
"Four kills," the one on the left was saying, loud enough for the bay to hear, "and Pix still wants credit for the second two horn when everyone saw me land the finishing hit."
"You hit it after it was already down," the girl beside him said.
"It wasn’t fully down."
"Its arm was off."
"Arms aren’t the kill, Mara."
"Tell that to the arm."
They walked into the bay like they had built it themselves. Gear scuffed and burned in places, a gash across one helmet that hadn’t been there before the mission, and not one of them looked like they were bothered about any of it. They were nineteen and they had just killed four Harbingers and they wanted everyone in the bay to know both of those things.
The leader came last off the ramp.
Rael. S ranked, Noah felt it immediately, the output sitting in the air around him clean and present. Dark haired, jaw set, built like someone who had been in fights since before the academy and had stopped losing them early. He walked into the bay and looked around it with the slow assessment of someone checking that everything was where he left it.
His eyes found Brooks and he crossed to her and saluted.
"Mission complete Commander. Four confirmed kills, two one horns two two horns, outer eastern sector. Zero casualties. Finished two days ahead of schedule." He dropped the salute. "Pix is trying to steal my kill count again."
"I’m not stealing anything," Pix said from behind him.
"Debrief in an hour," Brooks said. "Get fed first."
"Yes ma’am." Rael turned.
And stopped.
He looked at Noah standing beside Brooks with his hands in his pockets and the white hair and the calm expression of someone who had nowhere to be.
Rael looked at him for a second. Then he looked at Brooks. Then back at Noah.
"Is that," he said.
"Rael," Brooks said.
"No I’m just asking." He took two steps toward Noah, head tilting. "Noah Eclipse. In the flesh." He looked him up and down the way you looked at something you’d been told was impressive and were deciding whether you agreed. "Huh."
Noah looked at him.
"You’re shorter than I thought," Rael said.
Behind him Mara put her hand over her mouth. The one called Pix looked at the ceiling.
"Rael," Brooks said, with more edge this time.
"I’m being genuine," Rael said, not looking at her, eyes still on Noah. "The streams make you look bigger. All that void energy and the dragons and whatever." He gestured vaguely at Noah’s general existence. "In person you’re just a guy." He crossed his arms. "A guy who left, by the way. Took his team and his Article 47 and walked out when the EDF got too complicated." He looked around the bay. "And now you’re back. On my station. Standing next to my commander." He looked back at Noah. "So I’ll ask again. What exactly are you doing here?"
The four behind him had gone quiet. Not uncomfortable quiet. Watching quiet. They wanted to see where this went.
Noah looked at Rael.
Then he looked past him at Storm, who had appeared at the bay entrance at some point and was sitting there watching Rael with the patient attention of something that had made no decisions yet.
"Stand down," Noah said quietly, to Storm.
Storm’s tail swept once.
Rael turned and looked at Storm. Looked at him properly, the full scale of a Hollow Blizzard Monarch sitting in a docking bay entrance with lightning running quiet across his scales and his eyes on Rael specifically.
Rael turned back to Noah.
Noah was still smiling.
’My station,’ Noah thought, looking at him. ’S ranked at nineteen, zero casualties, four Harbinger kills, calls the station his and gets in my face inside thirty seconds of meeting me.’ He looked at the jaw and the crossed arms and the complete absence of any intention to back down. ’I genuinely like this kid.’
He said nothing.
Just kept smiling.
Which was somehow making it worse for Rael, whose jaw had tightened slightly at the smile, the expression of someone who had expected a reaction and hadn’t gotten one and wasn’t sure what to do with that.
"Rael," Brooks said, flat now. Final. "Feed your team."
Rael held Noah’s eyes for another second.
Then he uncrossed his arms and turned and walked toward the corridor, his team falling in behind him, and as he passed Noah he said it low and direct.
"Don’t get comfortable."
Noah watched him go. All five of them through the bay doors, Mara glancing back once, Pix not glancing back at all.
Brooks stood beside Noah and looked at the empty doorway.
"I know," Noah said, before she could say anything.
"I didn’t say anything."
"You were about to."
She looked at him. "You’re going to have to work with that team."
Noah looked at the doorway where Rael had disappeared.
’Good,’ he thought.