there.
“Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that there has been a rule change and I do have the power to kick students off of my team. If this happens, you forfeit all the points you could’ve gotten if I didn’t kick you off.”
She smiled wide, and the room felt a bit more hospitable; already, she struck Asa as someone that had a talent for altering the mood in a social situation. “Now, everyone open up to page number one; let’s get through this fast so that we can have the rest of the evening off.”
And she began to go through the rules. She read quickly, skipping over sentences that she didn’t think were important. She used her tone to emphasize some passages. She seemed nice, and Asa thought about his first meeting with the Bulls. It had been rambunctious, and Koab had banged his chest and yelled to get them excited about the upcoming season. Roxanne seemed to take a more studious approach at getting her team ready.
She read for an hour, and, with so much having happened that day, Asa’s mind inevitably began to drift.
Listening to all the talk about Winggame rules made him realize how badly he wanted to compete in a fair season. He often times daydreamed about what it would be like if a normal person watched a match. The uniforms flying over the water, the tackles, the different colored wings, and, or course, the mutations. If they televised this thing, they’d make a fortune. We’re such incredible athletes that people would be mesmerized.
Asa believed that more than half of the Academy students were mutated so far beyond normal capacity that they would dominate in any professional sporting league of their choosing. In football, their sheer speed and strength would put them in a class of their own. As a running back, an Academy student would be able to plow throug h a world-class lineman that was three times their size. Even in a sport where strength could be overcome with good form, like baseball, an Academy student would be elite. Asa remembered the Fishies being told last semester about how the mutations would also make them more coordinated. Asa felt that if he were in a batter’s box, even without any practice, his increased coordination would put him at an advantage over a ten-time All-Star professional baseball player who had devoted half his life to the game. After the mutations, things seemed to happen slower. Asa would be able to see the individual stitches as a 100-miles per hour fastball sped towards him. His coordination was so good that he would be able to orchestrate every inch of his body, down to his fingers and his toes, into swinging the bat. Normal humans couldn’t do that. And then, once solid contact was made, his strength would make driving the ball no problem.
Asa realized that it was a mildly insane desire to want to play a fair season of Winggame so badly. And he did want it badly; he hoped, however slim the chances, that the Multipliers would just leave him alone. I know I shouldn’t want to play this game that much, though.
Truth was, these people had kidnapped all the students against their will and as they played, their lives were on the line. No matter how fantastic or expensive the game was, it was all a way to weed out the students that the Academy didn’t want. And they would go to great lengths to do this. Proof of this could be seen in the upcoming Task for this year; which was promised to leave more students dead than ever before. How much did they say they spent on it? Ten billion dollars!?
Asa still couldn’t swallow that number. Where was all the money going? Asa’s mind went wild with this question. Maybe they have hired some military company to come and battle us, he thought . Maybe, to make a level playing field, they’ll let the hired guns use their assault rifles and leave the mutated students with just their hands. He
Lynsay Sands
Debbie Fuller Thomas
Donna Augustine
Kristal Lim
Patricia Dusenbury
David Moody
Jennifer Harlow
Ava May
John Rickards
Philip Blood