Chapter 2064: Game Begin

The instructors did not wait for the students to organize themselves.

The moment Lorna gave the signal, three of them reached out and caught the floating balls nearest to them, and in the same smooth motion, they hurled them across the chamber toward the scattered group of cadets.

The balls flew straight and fast through the zero-gravity space, with nothing to pull them downward and nothing to slow them except the faint resistance of the air, and the students who had been watching them approach scattered in every direction at once.

Most of them managed to get out of the way. Some kicked off the nearest wall panel and drifted aside, others twisted their bodies awkwardly in the air until the ball passed through the space they had just occupied, and one cadet simply curled into a ball and let a throw sail harmlessly over his back.

The balls struck the padded walls behind them and rebounded back into the chamber, and the students who were closest scrambled to catch them before the instructors could reach them first.

A few of them succeeded and threw them back.

Their throws were wilder than the instructors’ had been, and in the strange weightless environment, more than one cadet sent himself drifting backward in the opposite direction from his throw, flailing slightly as he tried to stop. Still, the balls flew toward the center of the chamber, and the instructors were forced to move.

They did so with an ease that made it obvious how many times they had played this game before. Lorna turned her body slightly and let a ball pass within a hand’s width of her shoulder, while another instructor simply pushed himself a short distance upward and allowed two throws to pass beneath his feet.

For the first full minute, no one was hit at all.

Balls flew back and forth across the chamber in a growing tangle of rebounds and counterthrows, the students dodging and scrambling and the instructors drifting calmly through the chaos, and for a little while, it seemed as though the game might go on forever without either side gaining an advantage.

Then the first student went out.

She was one of the girls who had been watching one of the instructors so closely that she failed to notice a ball thrown by another one. It struck her low on the shin, and almost immediately, the chamber’s fields around her shifted.

The invisible force that had been holding her aloft weakened gradually, and gravity began reclaiming her, drawing her slowly and gently downward until her feet touched the padded floor at the bottom of the chamber.

She stood there for a moment, looking up at the others with a disappointed expression, before an instructor at the edge of the chamber waved her over to the side.

After that, the rest of the students became considerably more alert.

They stopped clustering together and spread out more evenly across the chamber, watching the rebounding balls as carefully as they watched the instructors, and they began to make better use of the items they had drawn.

Jason, to Ning’s mild surprise, had worked out his air cannon remarkably quickly. Whenever a ball came toward him, he either fired a burst of compressed air directly at it, knocking it off course before it could reach him, or turned the cannon in the opposite direction and fired it to push himself out of the way.

He did not look particularly graceful while doing it, and more than once, he sent himself spinning slightly after a hasty shot, but he stayed in the game, and that was more than Ning had expected.

Liam was using his boxing gloves exactly the way he had clearly intended to from the moment he drew them.

Every time a ball came near him, he simply punched it away with a sharp, practiced jab, sending it flying back toward the center of the chamber. On one occasion, he struck a ball hard enough that it went straight toward an instructor, who had to twist quickly to avoid it. Liam looked very pleased with himself afterward.

Naysha moved with the same controlled efficiency she had shown during the free-floating practice. Her hollow metal staff gave her a reach that none of the other students could match, and she used it to bat away incoming balls well before they reached her, sending them spinning off in directions that made them difficult for the instructors to catch again.

Ning, for his part, had a rope.

There was not a great deal one could do with ten meters of rope in a dodgeball game, and for the first minute, he had simply dodged like everyone else, letting the coil drift loosely around his arm. But once the game settled into its rhythm, he began to experiment.

He let out a length of the rope and swung it in a wide arc, and when the next ball came toward him, he snapped the end of it forward like a whip.

The tip struck the ball cleanly in the middle and knocked it aside.

Ning smiled slightly and did it again, and then again, adjusting the length of rope he let out depending on how far away the incoming ball was.

A shorter length gave him faster, tighter strikes for balls that came close, while a longer one let him reach out and deflect throws long before they arrived, and with every swing, his aim grew more precise until he was striking balls out of the air with almost casual accuracy.

He was doing fine.

The other students, however, were beginning to fall.

The instructors had clearly been holding back during the opening minute, perhaps to let the cadets get comfortable, and now that the students had spread out and settled in, the instructors started working together.

Two of them would throw at the same student from different directions at once, forcing the cadet to dodge one throw straight into the path of the other, and before long, students were being picked off one after another.