A month later, Ivy was still struggling with her conflicting feelings. On the one hand, Rose had been the head of recruitment for a demon army. On the other hand, she was Ivy’s mother. Ivy loved her mother but hated what she’d done. The whole thing was tearing her up inside.
I reached across the table and gave Ivy’s hand a good squeeze. She squeezed me back, wiping her tears away and putting on a happy face. She wasn’t the best fighter in our group, but she was more resilient than people gave her credit for.
After breakfast, we headed over to Hall Four, where Captain Somerset was waiting for us. Nero had overseen our initial training, but as the top ranking person in New York—and the only angel—he had more important things to do than to spend his days torturing lowly soldiers. That was now Captain Somerset’s job, and she took that job very seriously.
We approached cautiously to see what the good captain had for us today. Yesterday it had been a field trip to the plains of monsters to go hunting for a pack of fire wolves. As someone who’d grown up next door to the plains of monsters, I’d learned that you never crossed that big stone and magic wall standing between us and the beasts who’d taken over half of the Earth. Sure I’d ignored that sensible rule a few times in my years as a bounty hunter, but I’d never gone hunting for monsters out there. It was insane. When I’d told Captain Somerset that, she’d responded that the Legion didn’t require sanity from its soldiers, only obedience. She’d almost managed to keep a straight face as she’d said it.
Today’s offering wasn’t monsters or field trips beyond the wall. Instead, Captain Somerset had set up the gym hall with an obstacle course of infinite impossibilities.
“Come in closer now. Don’t be shy,” she said, grinning. She might have been trying to kill us, but at least she was doing it with a smile.
“What is that?” Toren said, his eyes widening as he looked up at the obstacle course looming over us like a storm cloud ready to let loose.
“That is your latest challenge,” Captain Somerset declared.
“That’s not challenging. It’s impossible,” Lucy gasped.
“Some of those jumps just aren’t even doable,” Lyle agreed.
“You have supernatural skills,” the captain reminded us. “You have the speed, strength, and stamina of vampires.”
“And the self-healing too,” said Roden, one of the brats. “If we fall and get hurt, we can just nibble a little on Ivy’s neck to heal ourselves.” He flashed her a grin, and the other brats chuckled.
Ivy smiled at them. “Sorry, not my type.” Everyone knew Ivy had a thing for the Legion officers—and that they had a thing for her.
“Ok, enough chitchat. Shut up and listen,” Captain Somerset told us.
Had Nero been here, he would have made us run laps or do pushups for talking. He believed if you had enough energy to talk, you weren’t pushing yourself hard enough—and so he pushed you harder. But Nero wasn’t here, and I really needed to stop thinking about him. Obsessing over an angel wasn’t healthy. I had to get a new hobby. Like eating chocolate. There wasn’t anything unhealthy about that.
“You will begin the course with a dash across these raised platforms,” Captain Somerset said. “But beware. If you put your weight on any one of them for too long, it will drop to the floor. The final platform in the sequence leads to a big jump directly onto this climbing wall.” She indicated a leap worthy of a spider. “The climb will bring you to your next challenge.”
She walked beneath a series of wooden posts twenty feet up. Hall Four had the highest ceiling of any of the Legion’s gyms. Maybe this was where they taught angels how to fly. No, come to think of it, they probably just pushed new angels off the roof of the building. That was more like the Legion’s style.
“Jump from one post to the next until you reach the tightrope,” she said. “After a quick walk across the rope, a jump into this vertical tunnel awaits you. Next is a dash through a labyrinth. Some of the walls are equipped with motion sensors and will shoot out smoke and debris at you as you pass.”
Someone coughed in disbelief behind me, but I wasn’t surprised. For the past two months, the Legion had been putting us into one difficult situation after the other—and they’d made no secret of the fact that they didn’t expect all of us to survive. From the fifty people who’d shown up at the initiation ceremony, only sixteen of us remained.
“After you escape the labyrinth of exploding walls, a door stands in your way.”
She led us to a metal door we all knew well. It was identical to the ones Nero had put us in front of every day for weeks. He’d made us punch the door again and again until our hands bled, and we’d learned to tune out that pain. He’d called it an exercise in willpower, and it really was. It had taken enormous willpower not to punch him instead. As it was, I’d just imagined his face on the door while punching it.
But I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Nero. I returned my full attention to Captain Somerset.
“Each time you punch the door, it will open a little more, until the opening is wide enough for you to go through,” she explained, passing the door. “On the other side, your final challenge awaits.”
She indicated a bar used for pull-ups—except these weren’t mere pull-ups in store for us. To complete this challenge, we had to hop the bar up a series of levels until we reached the top. And then we had to hop the bar back down again, level by level. The best part was we had to do all of this while our hands were still bleeding from punching that door how many ever times it took to open it.