Lucas walked up to the featureless door and paused. He turned to look at the sleek metal companion behind him with an unvoiced question in his eyes. Even though they weren’t linked, Lucas could tell immediately that Lilly understood.

“Not everything is about training exercises, Lucas.” She shook her head and her blue LED eyes flickered with amusement. “Didn’t you watch hours and hours of film between scrimmages? I’m sure your coach also talked things through with you and your team outside of matches. Just think of it like that.”

“You’re right.” Lucas sighed. “I guess I was hoping we could just keep shooting training bots.”

“I’d like that too.” Lilly chuckled and reached out to pat Lucas’ short dark hair affectionately. “I’ll come pick you up when you’re done. Did you remember to pack your lunch box?”

Lucas frowned. “Are… are you not coming in with me?”

“Pilots only I’m afraid.” She winked and began to back away down the cement hallway. “Have fun. Make friends.”

Lucas rolled his eyes but deep down felt a twinge of nervousness creep into his system. Despite all of her teasing, Lucas always felt better with Lilly near. He had to be careful when to even acknowledge that thought as he knew the flirtatious robot would squeal and laugh about it to no end. Lilly was just….

Too human… Lucas frowned at the thought. 

It didn’t match up with anything he expected from artificial intelligence. Lucas had felt it early on, but his time with Lilly had only served to strengthen that suspicion. This wasn’t some neural network that had learned how to emulate human speech, behavior, and emotions. Lilly was something far more real. At least, that’s what Lucas found himself desperately hoping for as his time here wore on.

“Are you going to go in or are you just going to keep standing there?” A male voice caused Lucas’ body to seize up.

He recognized the voice from the day before. Lucas turned to find a tall, muscular boy glaring at him. James Sanderson. He didn’t realize this until now, but Lucas had pictured the outspoken military kid to look like Flash. James wasn’t the blond hair, blue eyed heartbreaker that Lucas’ teammate was. James had muted red hair, critical green eyes, and a face full of acne. He wore long army pants and a simple olive green shirt. Though James looked to be slightly older than a lot of the other trainees Lucas had seen he still couldn’t be older than seventeen.

“Permission to pass, team leader.” James gave Lucas an extremely sarcastic salute.

Lucas didn’t know how to placate the situation, nor did he fully understand what rights and responsibilities his role as team leader granted him. James’ behavior was something Lucas had seen many different times throughout his professional gaming career. Being one of the top competitors in the world at something took a certain amount of self confidence. In order to be among the best, you had to believe you were the best. Even when people like James or Flash lose, they still come back with a chip on their shoulder and even more to prove. That was one area that Lucas couldn’t relate to his fellow competitors. He never felt the need to prove anything to anyone. He was there to compete. Words didn’t matter as long as you played well. Lucas never felt the same need to verbalize his own performance or try and hold that over other competitors. In order to avoid potentially injuring James’ clearly hurt self pride, Lucas decided to simply step out of the way and let James pass without comment on his behavior.

James huffed and stepped forward. The tall redhead paused with his hand on the doorknob. 

“How did you know?” He asked without looking at Lucas.

“Know what?” Lucas watched the other boy carefully.

James’ eyes narrowed and a slight red tint shone through his pale face.

“Yesterday. How did you know where we were? Like on the stairs and stuff.” James finally looked at Lucas directly. “I don’t mean generally. Every single one of your bullets were exactly where we were. How did you know?”

Lucas held back the urge to sigh.

“That’s just… where I’d knew you’d go.” Lucas lifted his shoulders slightly and let them fall. “I watched you, all of you, clear the town and figured out how you’d react.”

James locked onto Lucas with a laser-like stare. After a few moments of silent probing, the tall redhead shook his head and opened the door.

“Yeah, right.” James stomped into the room without a glance back.

Nice one team leader. Lucas released that pent up sigh and followed James quietly into the room.

Now that Viator squad had been assembled and Lucas had been named as the team leader, General Corter felt it was necessary for the team to begin attending a specially created strategy and tactics class. Lucas had held out hope that maybe his suggestion of Ashten taking on the role as team lead would come through, but it didn’t seem like that avenue would pan out. Lucas and James were the first to arrive. Lucas took a chair near the back of the room while James sat front and center. A stiff silence quickly fell over the room as both of its occupants did their best to ignore one another. Fortunately it wasn’t long before the rest of the squad filtered in.

Ashten was third to arrive. Though her raven black hair was still in the early stages of recovering from the medical buzz she had been subject to before, Lucas still thought she was beautiful. Even the hyper focused James couldn’t help watching her pass by his desk. Her narrow blue eyes sought Lucas out and she ended up sitting directly next to him.

“Was it some sort of test?” Ashten asked quietly from Lucas’ left.

Lucas blinked and turned to her. “Was what a test?”

“They said you wanted me to be team lead.” Ashten fixated on him with a sharp look. “Why?”

“You’re squad leader on Phoenix aren’t you?” Lucas shrugged and tried to sound casual. “You did a really good job leading that team throughout the year. The entire teams’ stats rose in every category under your leadership. I just thought you were clearly the right choice for team leader here.”

“You… you watched my games?” Ashten looked away as the door opened to the classroom.

Why does she seem flustered? Lucas frowned at her response.

“Well yeah. I watch almost everyone in the competitive league. I don’t really spend time doing much else.”

The corners of Ashten’s mouth dropped and her demeanor turned frosty in an instant. Not being sure why Ashten’s attitude changed on a dime, Lucas switched his attention to the other squad members finding their seats. Though he had never seen any of them in person before, Lucas began to immediately pick out the names of everyone simply from small behaviors and movements he observed around the room. 

The slightly heavier boy cracking a joke at the front of the room was Douglas Smith. The goofy jokester was around five feet eleven inches tall and had brown hair that Lucas assumed would be curly if it were longer. The tough girl rolling her eyes at Dug was Christina Fisher. Her German ancestry shone through with her blonde hair and light blue eyes. The Asian American boy that took the empty seat next to Ashten was Kenneth Lee. Lucas watched Kenneth run a nervous hand through his buzzed black hair and ask Ashten about herself, to which the half Korean girl pointedly ignored his presence.

The timid brunette hovering around Christina had to be Allie Denison. Her warm brown eyes contained a badly contained nervousness that Lucas had clearly seen in the training exercise the day before. Enrique Lopez entered the room and didn’t say much to anyone before taking a seat in the front left corner of the room. His quiet demeanor was matched by the last member of the squad, Sharon Vienna. The young African American woman sat down with a bored expression in the center of the room. Lucas must have stared for too long as Sharon turned her head around and met his gaze. Before Lucas could fully figure out the appropriate response to being caught watching her, Sharon gave him a small smile and nodded her head in his direction. Lucas blushed and nodded back.

“What do you see?” Ashten asked quietly from the side once more.

Lucas turned to find Ashten watching him closely.

“When you look at all of them.” She gestured to the rest of the room. “What do you see?”

“Well…” Lucas shuffled in his chair a bit as he began formulating his thoughts. “I think there’s a reason everybody comes from a different background.”

“You mean there’s logic behind the squad looking like a painfully crafted sitcom that’s trying to appeal to every audience?” Ashten said with a raised eyebrow.

Lucas nodded. “I think the general is trying to make this squad as approachable as possible for whoever they bring over once that process starts back up again so that no matter who it is, they could potentially have someone to relate to and make them more likely to stay.”

“You think they’ve stopped?” Ashten asked with genuine surprise.

Lucas nodded. “Why else would we be the only ones here?”

Their conversation was cut off as an officer opened the door and stepped into the room. James was the first to leap to his feat and snap to attention but the room wasn’t far behind him. Lucas knew that he had been told he didn’t have to salute anyone, but he did anyway so as to not draw any unwanted attention from the rest of the squad.

“At ease, you may be seated.” The captain called out to the room as she set her bag down on the teaching desk at the front of the room.

There was a brief moment of scraping chairs and creaking of desks as the squad of nine trainees took their seats.

“My name is Captain Rita Dunn and I will be providing Viator squad with special training in tactics and strategy.” The captain said in a straightforward business tone. “We will be taking the lessons we discuss here and applying them directly to training exercises with your AI combat platforms. Any questions?”

No one raised their hands and captain Dunn gave a satisfied nod.

“Good. Our first topic will be the revolution of urban combat. Specifically, how defensive lines work in a dense city.”

Despite how amazing Lucas’ mind was, his near flawless ability to remember the tiniest of details had never transferred well to the classroom. This however, felt much different. Lucas felt like he was back in Defcon Zero’s team locker room being lectured by coach Alan on different routes of attack and weapons to use in certain situations. Lucas drank in the information Rita was providing them and he couldn’t wait to see how they would use it in training. Never in a million years did Lucas expect how relevant this information would become for him, and the rest of Viator squad.

JTNestman

I had meant to keep updating three times a week but life has made that increasingly difficult as of late. I fear this is entering the "it will be updated when it's updated" style of release. I want to assure you that it's not for lack of enthusiasm on my part. I'm really looking forward to this next act in our story, but my writing time has been severely limited by life I'm afraid.

Thanks as always to those of you who keep reading Focal Point. I've been really enjoying writing this story and I'm extremely excited to see it ramp up to even more epic moments. I'll try to keep updating whenever I can but it may be longer between than I had hoped. Till next time.