Over the next few days, Mako, Bill, Leon, Erin, Iris, and Nathan were determined to prove themselves as a unified team. Each one of them focused on honing their individual skills and addressing the flaws that Commander Sable had pointed out.

The training area was very advanced and versatile as it could quickly create small rooms, build obstacle courses, create dummy bots to practice against, etc.

This was possible due to the whole room being built out of nanites that could reshape into anything and even repair broken things, making them quite handy.

Mako needed to address his recklessness and lack of discipline. Even before he ever awakened his powers, he always had the habit of running head-first into a situation without properly thinking it out.

Even though he was smart, and could think of creative and amazing solutions for the situations he finds himself, only if he gave himself the time to think things through.

Mako used the scenario function in the training room which made a small room with a scenario that played out and Mako had to make the right decision in order to pass. Sometimes the scenarios were to identify a spy, save someone who is being held hostage, find a hidden bomb in a populated area, etc.

This scenario-based training not only helped Mako improve his infiltration and searching skills which weren’t great in the first place, but they were slowly getting better.

It also taught him that he had to think before he acted. During the first and second days, Mako was unable to successfully pass a single scenario because he kept rushing in with his abilities on full tilt, without thinking of any repercussions which led him to waste time, causing unnecessary damage, and even hurting innocents.

Mako struggled quite a bit in suppressing his own natural instincts and using his brain to think around the problem to get the best outcome.

On the third day, he was getting the hang of it, but it was on the fourth day that Mako finally cleared one of the scenarios on medium difficulty. It was a quite small and lame milestone, but a milestone nonetheless as Mako continued to improve and become more of a calculative thinker, and he was able to clear a couple more scenarios by the end of the week.

Mako also spent hours practicing control over his elemental abilities. He practiced creating precise and controlled fireballs, lightning strikes, and earth constructs. He also worked on managing his energy more efficiently, learning when to unleash powerful attacks and when to conserve his strength for critical moments.

Even though he had a greater energy pool than the others, it still wasn’t infinite and he had to learn to also think about his teammate’s energy pools when fighting so that he doesn’t overextend himself or his team.

He practiced strategic planning, analyzing different combat scenarios, and considering the strengths and weaknesses of all his teammates.

**************

*BANG!*

In one corner of the training room, there were constant sounds of fighting and destruction as throughout the entire week, Nathan and Bill had been having duel after duel.

It all started when Bill walked up to Nathan on the first day and offered to talk things through, and he even apologized for them getting off on the wrong foot; however, he was met with silence as Nathan completely ignored him and resumed his training.

This enraged Bill as while Nathan was practicing he secretly attacked him using his Earth ability.

However, due to Nathan always keeping his advanced perception skill active out of habit, he easily sensed and dodged the attack.

Even though the earth spike was unable to attack and hurt Nathan which Bill intended, it did manage to piss Nathan off.

“How dare you!” Nathan shouted as he transformed his hand into a claw and grabbed Bill’s neck in an instant.

Bill raised another earth pillar from underneath the two of them aimed straight at Nathan’s chin. Since Nathan has his hand locked on Bill’s neck, he couldn’t move back and so the earth pillar landed cleanly on his chin, sending him flying in the air and knocking him back a couple of feet.

Nathan and Bill were both quite enraged at the notion of the other using their abilities on them and they both began to fight. They didn’t hold back at all as Bill was even tempted to use his mutant gene against Nathan, but before he could do so, Commander Sable interrupted their fight.

Both boys tried to justify their actions, but Commander Sable was having none of it as he didn’t say a single word and instead just grabbed both of them by their collars and dragged them to the corner of the training room.

He used the Nanite module to create a dueling room and threw both of them inside.

“You two are banned from using the training room at all except this singular room. From morning till night, as long as you want to train, it will only be done here. You want to fight then fight, you want to train then train, I don’t care what you want to do, do it inside here!” The Commander ordered.

Bill and Nathan continued to argue against the commander’s order, but the commander had said what he wanted to say as he closed the doors and locked them from the outside trapping them both inside.

The two of them tried to just ignore each other and train in their own corners, but since the room was so small, there was barely any room for two people to practice their big moves alone, and that was exactly what happened as Bill’s moves accidentally hit Nathan and Nathan’s blood attacks accidentally hit Bill.

The two were getting quite fed up and in the end, just started fighting each other. The dueling room had an AI that would oversee all fights to make sure no one accidentally got killed as it would freeze all movement if anyone was close to dying.

Throughout the week, those two were continuously going back and forth between the dueling room and the infirmary.

After about 5 days of useless and pointless fighting, both boys finally talked to each other for the first time after getting exhausted from fighting each other which ended in the usual draw.

They still had resentment toward each other and didn’t talk like friends at all, but they had at least come to recognize and acknowledge each other’s strength. Nathan was quite skilled in close combat and had a great grip over several martial arts making him quite a good fighter.

Bill acknowledged that his personal feelings towards Nathan had affected their teamwork. To overcome this, he took the initiative to sit down and have an honest conversation with Nathan.

Bill tried to talk things through with Nathan once again, and this time he did reply, but his reply was as cold as ever.

“Listen, I don’t care about your sob story, nor do I want to share anything about myself with you. If you have such a problem, just leave the whole mission to me, I can do it better than you chumps anyways,” Nathan said.

Bill had to swallow his pride and anger for just a moment as he had to think clearly in order to make this thing work.

In the end, Bill came up with the only solution he could think of, he offered Nathan a deal. 𝙚𝙙𝙤𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝒎

The deal was that they would have a total of 20 dueling rounds where they would fight one another with the catch being that that the AI would record and score their performance. It wouldn’t matter who had more wins than the other as it would come down to who was the overall better fighter.

If Bill won, Nathan would have to cooperate with the team and stop being such an ignorant prick, and if Nathan won, Bill would remove himself from the mission draft and he would stay behind while the rest of them took their first mission.

The stakes were high for both of them but the rewards were sweet as well. Nathan agreed to Bill’s deal with the condition that he didn’t want any talk about his past to come up even if Bill won to which Bill agreed.

The two boys fought from morning till night every day, having intense battles with each other one after the other. Even though they both would deny it, they did form a bond over their fights as both of them knew how the other fought in great detail and were even able to anticipate their moves.

In the end, the scoring was close, but Bill was able to win the challenge by a whopping two points.

Final Score

Nathan Wesley VS Bill Johnson

769 – 771

It was quite a close finish which showed that even though Bill had the ability advantage it didn’t matter as Nathan’s fighting skills and techniques gave him a great advantage as well.

At the end of the day, Nathan was a man of his word and agreed to cooperate with the team moving forward while still keeping his distance from them which was still a huge win for Bill.

Even though Nathan was ignorant, he did recognize that his arrogance and lack of cooperation had been a hindrance to the team’s success. Although he still didn’t make friends with the others, he decided to respect their abilities and work alongside them without causing any conflict.

“Maybe these guys are different…” Nathan thought as he watched Bill celebrate his epic achievement, but quickly changed his mind.

Over at the other side of the training room, Erin, Leon, and Iris were also training hard to improve and become better for the rematch.