“Mr. Fulgen, if you were to describe yourself in three worlds, what would they be?”

  “Uh… what kind of words are we talking about? Family friendly?”

  The rest of the upper floors were depressingly mundane office dronery. Executives up top, middle management and cube farm beneath. Though I guessed even a company that literally had superheroes as a product needed some of that infrastructure.

  The one highlight came from an unexpected source. A man in a labcoat bustled up to us and accosted Marin, holding up a sheaf of papers.

  “Miss Marin,” he said breathlessly. “There you are. I’m so sorry, I’d forgotten about the new recruits! We tested the blood sample from the creature, and it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before! And the anatomy, it’s truly… But that’s another story. It’s the genetic profile. It proves it! It—”

  Marin shushed him and gestured at Wally and me.

  The scientist blushed profusely. He and Marin took a few steps away, and he continued to speak in hushed but excited tones.

  “Was he talking about the cat?” Wally whispered.

  “Of course he was talking about the freaking cat!” I hiss-whispered back.

  I saw an orange light hovering over Marin’s and the scientist’s shoulders. It was Habby. He zipped over to me. [He just said, ‘It’s a titan.’ I do not know what that means, but Marin clearly does.]

  ?Habby, you beautiful little sneak. Keep that up and I might just start respecting you.?

  [Your words are like honey,] he said dryly.

  Of course, I had no idea what they were talking about either. Wally might—it was just the kind of obscure knowledge he’d look up when he was bored or supposed to be doing something more important—but Wally had what one might call a low whisper tolerance.

  Still, I pointed to my lips to indicate Wally should read them, and I very quietly and carefully whispered, “Do you know what a titan is?”

  “A what?” Wally asked loudly, drawing some glares from the surrounding cubicles.

  Shones. At least he hadn’t repeated it back to me.

  Marin took the cue to shoo the scientist away, saying, “I’ll be down in a little while to take a look in person.” Then we descended to the third floor.

  “This is our training level,” said Marin. “We have the standard gym, enhanced gym, and our main block of training rooms designed to blunt and withstand sorcerer abuse. You will spend a lot of time on this floor in the coming weeks, Mr. Fulgen. I understand you just reached tier 2?”

  “That’s right,” I said, glancing through a glass wall into what looked like an ordinary gym.

  “Then I believe your most important skills need to reach tier 2 next. We have exercises, targets, and dummies of all kinds that will help you train them.”

  [She is correct,] said Habby. I could feel him truly engaging now that one of his favorite subjects had come up again. [Upgrading your skills will be your next step. Then when you reach the top of tier 2 at level 20, things will get even more interesting.]

  I was still peering into the gym, which was sparse, though I spotted a few individuals wearing the gym clothing equivalent of the tight fitting grey and blue of the G-Tech sorcerers, as well as what appeared to be a few regular employees jogging on treadmills. “Uh, what’s an enhanced gym?”

  “You can see some of the equipment in the back,” said Marin. “Machines and weights designed to challenge those with physical enhancement. Valery will guide you through that.”

  Marin pointed at a tall, almost Amazonian black-haired woman who was stomping through the gym, bellowing encouragement or something like it at the sorcerers working out. She screamed at a beefy man with an eyepatch, who I recognized from Team Dominion, and pointed toward the back wall. Then, with one hand, she picked up a barbell, still loaded with weights that had to weigh multiple hundreds of pounds, and stalked off to rack them.

  “She’s terrifying,” Wally observed.

  [She’s a good kind of terrifying.]

  ?Oh, for the love of—?

  We stepped into an observation room, where we could see multiple cameras in multiple training rooms. They were all lined with gleaming metal and had multiple rectangular panels along the walls. It looked like they were first aid kits of some sort. Yuki, the healer from Team Ambassador who had helped Wally with his anxiety attack earlier, was also in the observation room with us. She quietly greeted Marin, nodded wordlessly to us, and resumed staring boredly at the monitors.

  “Sparring,” said Marin, “is one of the best ways to train your skills outside of actual combat. You’re going to receive some instruction on aether theory, Fulgen, though I’m sure your lecti can also teach you some principles. But in general, the more ‘real’ the stakes are, the faster your skills and levels will rise. Ah, this is good timing. Junpei and Dante are having at it.”

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  Dante Katsuro, the Flame Arbalist from Team Ambassador, was indeed squaring off against Junpei Lin, the acid shooting Bombardier from Team Snowcrest. They both pulled small vials of green liquid from a bin near the door of the room, drank them, and deposited them in a different bin.

  “Bluntsab,” Marin explained. “It’s a potion that temporarily reduces the effectiveness of most weapons and combat skills, making it excellent for less deadly sparring.”

  A buzzer went off, and the match began. Both combatants started at nearly opposite ends of the room. Junpei blasted Dante with an arc of liquid acid. Dante rolled out of the way and used a fire skill I hadn’t seen before, like a jagged laser shooting from his palm. It glanced off Junpei, who also dodged and rolled, forming a green cloud around him to mask his position.

  [Fire Beam,] observed Habby. [He’s, you know, passable at it. Issa was better.]

  ?Should I try to get that skill??

  [I thought so at first, but it’s difficult to aim, especially while in motion.]

  ?I can see how that might affect me.?

  Dante and Junpei circled closer and closer, each taking potshots. Junpei obscured his position by hiding behind an acid cloud, and Dante used speed and agility to avoid attacks. Eventually they both charged and fought hand-to-hand. Now they switched skills. Dante used Immolate, and Junpei used a similar skill for acid that made his hands glisten and drip with noxious fluid. There was a hissing noise each time they struck or parried.

  [They’re both men of extremes. They’ve honed a very long range attack, tacked on a technique to prevent retaliation from range, and focused most of the rest of their skills on close range fighting. It might be a sound practice in your world ruled by guns. It also might synergize with their teams.]

  In the end, it was Dante who got the very fiery upper hand. He pummeled Junpei to the ground in a brutal display. For a moment I thought the bombardier was unconscious. Then Dante reached down and gave the other man a hand up. Junpei looked dazed, his nose bloody and his face covered with multiple pink burns. They then exited the training room through a sliding door, now laughing with one another. Yuki sighed and slunk out of the observation room.

  “Uh, I can heal those burns,” I offered.

  “No need,” said Marin. “Yuki is on healing duty today. It’s one of the ways the healers train their skills, since they’re usually poorly suited for direct sparring. Anyway, I suspect you’ll be spending a lot of time on this floor over the next couple of months, Mr. Fulgen.”

  The second floor was a bunch of lavish meeting and conference rooms. I recognized the room where I’d met the other teams, and I thought I spotted the press room where Marin had given her dreaded conference earlier in the day.

  There were also, oddly, a couple more practice rooms that directly adjoined conference rooms. “Does that get a little noisy?” I asked. “People fighting on the other side of the wall when you’re giving quarterly fiscal reports or whatever?”

  “These have a special purpose.” Marin led us into one of the practice rooms, and we faced one of the walls. This one was structured differently from the others. It was much flatter and more regular, and it wasn’t lined with access panels.

  “Wait a minute,” said Wally. He was glancing at the floor and ceiling. “This wall is retractable?”

  Marin produced a remote and clicked a button. Sure enough, the wall receded into the floor, revealing thick reinforced glass. We could now see into the meeting room on the other side.

  I nodded appreciatively. “That’s gotta be a good icebreaker.”

  Marin smirked. “We get an amazing amount of traction from exhibitions. It gets investor interest, and even politicians like a little reminder that we aren’t just a money funnel that puts fit young people in tight clothing.”

  “But you’re also that,” I said wryly.

  “Well, that garners its own sort of support.”

  [I support it.]

  ?Do you want to spend the night in manboob jail? I swear I’ll do it.?

  “We also have a room with a transparent wall next to the cafeteria,” Marin continued. “We occasionally use it for public visitors or other major events, since there’s enough seating there for a larger audience.”

  Speaking of the cafeteria, that left the ground floor and the mezzanine. This level was partly dedicated to employee amenities, including the barracks. It also featured the press room, a visitor center, and other areas accessible to the general public. And, of course, the massive atrium, where the ice sculpture of Issa still posed dramatically.

  Most of the rest of the floor space was taken up by a heavily secured laboratory, research, and workshop complex. I felt Wally starting to vibrate with anticipation at that prospect.

  The mezzanine level also had a private walkway that led to the hospital next door to the G-Tech building. This was near the elevator, so it was what Marin pointed out first.

  “For injuries too complex or exhausting for our healers, we have this,” Marin said. Her face turned grim. “There are a few beds, including ICU, and an operating room set aside for our use at the other end.”

  “That’s… comforting. Do you use it often?”

  “Only occasionally, thank goodness. We’ve only had one casualty since our founding. It was early in the development of our strategies and processes.”

  We stood in silence for a moment, looking across the walkway.

  “More often,” Marin continued, “we send our healers over there when they have extra aether. Aetheric healing isn’t quite miraculous, as you might have guessed by now. In fact, it often doesn’t take without repeated applications. But it can help stabilize a patient in crisis, so it’s a little extra good we can do for the city. It’s good training for the sorcerers, too.”

  “That’s pretty cool.” I stared at my own hand. “They have a burn ward over there?”

  Marin raised an eyebrow. “That is a thought. I haven’t heard much about your healing skill, but it sounds unusual. How did you come about it?”

  “I got it in a starter pack. I’m gathering it’s like a normal heal skill on steroids, but only for heat burns. And it works extra well on any burns I inflict. I uh, didn’t want to make people suffer. Especially any innocents that might get caught in the crossfire, you know?”

  Marin’s reaction stunned me. She put a hand to her forehead, scrunched her eyes shut, and quietly cursed for a solid fifteen seconds. She whispered almost inaudibly, but my ears still burned. She pointed with her other hand, as if addressing specific people she was telling off.

  Then she noticed Wally and me staring at her like she’d lost her mind, and she took a moment to compose herself. Her eyes were shining. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I was just experiencing some frustration at an opinion I heard earlier today. One that you never need to mind.”

  I nodded at her. Even as I thought, bullshit.