KER-PEW! Suddenly, a bright flash of light eclipsed all of Laney's dressing room. As it faded, The Metal, Sentri, Buck, The Kidd, Alkaios, and Hermes stood before her, all laughing and shaking hands, as comfortably as if they had known each other longer than they had, before the two Grecian Gods flashed away just as swiftly as they came. Less surprised than any sane person should be, Laney simply got up from her vanity, walked over to The Metal, who was changing out of the stupid dress Laney made her wear and back in her normal do'gi, and asked her, "Well, did you get it?"
"Yeah, I got it. What do you even need this for anyway?"
"That's a secret, but I can assure you that it is for training purposes."
"Well, I genuinely can't be upset at that. I've done worse for training." She bounced up to her feet, making sure her weights were on tight, and turned back to her student. "Okay, Laney. Now time to pay up. What was your idea for getting me back to normal?"
Laney walked back over to her vanity and began digging through one of her many bags. She eventually rustles out a coin made of a bizarre metal that looked golden yet shone as if it were red, like a metallic piece of amber. She tossed it back to her teacher and said, "with this."
"This isn't what I think it is, is it?"
"Oh, yeah. I found some."
"Is anyone willing to explain it to the rest of the class?" Sentri asks, unamused by how well Metal and Laney communicate with minimal and uninformative exchanges.
"Laney found more Orichalcum."
"But I thought you and Joe exhausted the remaining supply on the planet to reinforce the Chrysanthemum."
"No, we just exhausted what was left over from Atlantis, the largest known supply. That's not to say more couldn't be made."
Confused, Buck felt the need to interject: "What's the big deal? Isn't it just a mix of other common ores like iron, copper, tin, zinc, and nickel?"
"No, no, no. That's just the failed attempts of alchemists that were found by people in the modern era. Little more than pyrite, almost. Fool's Orichalcum. The real deal has been a tricky substance to produce going back eons. The eldest called it Chashmal, which later became associated as a word for electricity for fairly ironic reasons. The angels would create grand structures with it and use it to fit armor for their entire armies. The first to discover the secret to producing who wasn't from Eden was Zeus, and his people began calling it Chalkolibanon. Every pantheon and society struggled to make the stuff, mostly churning out that junk compound you mentioned. The problem was that alchemists required the Prima Materia to make it work, and most couldn't figure out what that even was: life force. If you were a god-like being, you would have more than enough soul to spare to create weapons, armor, or whatever, due to the rateat which you can regenerate your life force. Normal beings, on the other hand, aren't so blessed. Even tapping into that sort of energy often kills those who try. But the avarice of man knows no bounds. That's where Atlantis came in for us. They knew the secret to making Orichalcum and produced it at a reasonable rate for quite some time. Then demand swiftly outpaced supply. Their king ordered his alchemist to produce as much as they could in as little time as possible, and that got them enough attention from the Olympians to wipe the empire off the face of the planet. But they did make their precious metal; they just didn't live long enough to enjoy it. We get to enjoy it, though."
"It's messed up just how pleased you are to be benefitting off of fallen societies."
"Whatever, dude. Bro, how is a stupid coin going to help?"
"I'm going to assume Laney wants me to visit an old friend in Thornhaven."
"Bingo, Sensei! Anyone there would kill for any amount of Orichalcum. Especially the Coven. It's just a shame that I'll be too busy with my tour to see your reunion."
In the midst of Laney's whimsical taunting, rustling and sirens erupted outside. It wasn't the Cretan police. It was a different sort of siren accompanied by the whirring of military helicopters. The sirens cut, then a voice echoed out of loudspeakers on the helicopters. It was a familiar voice that yelled, "C'mon out, you little bastard. Our local allies noticed your drop-off before and let us know you were here. You broke a lot of international agreements in the last couple of days, which gives me more than enough rights to take you out!"
"Jerry…" The Metal irritably muttered under her breath. "Okay, sport, you're up."
Everyone looked over at Laney, still acting cocky from before. Then she realized what her sensei meant.
"Um, excuse me?"
"What, I can't let Jerry see me like this. He's already annoying enough; I don't need to give him an excuse to come up with girly names to call me while I kick his butt. Besides, he's probably just got another stupid power armor or mech. You'll be fine."
"But I've got a show to play."
"Yeah, no. Nobody is going to show up to your concert with him causing a ruckus out there anyway. I can already hear people running away in the streets right now."
"But he's your annoyance. He's not even really a rival."
"And what better stepping stone on your way out of my apprenticeship than clobbering someone I regularly beat up?"
"Bro, that sounds more messed up than you think it does."
"Shut up, Kidd!" the two of them shout together. Sentri couldn't help but laugh as it reminded him of old times.
"Fine," Laney said, rolling her eyes, "I'll handle Jerry while you all sneak out using the band's bus. They won't miss it… probably." She changed into her old spruce do'gi and red sash that she wore as the instructing assistant back at the dojo and headed out the door. "You owe me a real sparring session next time. No holding back!"
Laney hiked out into the middle of the busy street, amid panicking denizens of the city flocking to safety, and flipped Jerome Gallagher the bird. "Jerry, you slimy bitch, get down here!"
Jerome pulled out his binoculars and took a closer look at the woman below cursing him out. Seeing the Fighters Guild logo on the breast of her gi, he began to recall a tall woman following The Metal around wearing the same spruce uniform. Then he did a double take on the larger-than-life promotional material scattered around the city and finally put two and two together: the world-famous pop idol Laney Lin was one of the very people he was hunting down this entire time. He took up the intercom again and shouted, "You're that runt's student, right? I didn't recognize you without your red hair and under all that prissy make-up."
"I didn't recognize you without my sensei's fist in your face!"
Jerome couldn't hear what she said, but he was pretty sure it was an insult since it came accompanied by another middle finger. The door slid open with Jerome rappelling down to the ground. With confidence, he marched over to Laney while taking off the shirt of his uniform, leaving just the wife-beater he had on underneath.
"Oh, wow. You didn't bring some kind of robot to fight for you? I may not be The Metal, but you realize I could cave in your chest with a light punch, right?"
"We shall see about that." He took out a syringe filled with a viscous blue liquid and shoved it directly into his left bicep. Inhaling deeply, all of Jerome's muscles pulsated until they acted as if they were fully flexed, no matter what position he took. His veins jutted out like a bodybuilder after just maxing out their sets. As he exhaled, his eyes shone the same blue color as the liquid he injected. "Playtime, little girl."
Not intimidated in the least, given Jerome's track record, Laney rushed at him and feinted with her hands before delivering a lightning-fast wheel kick. To her surprise, Jerome caught her foot and remained completely unfazed. Grasping her ankle, he launches Laney fifty feet away into a concrete wall. Laney was forced to dive away without much time to collect herself, as Jerome threw his fist into the wall. The entire storefront collapsed.
"What the hell, Jerry!?"
"After many tough deliberations, I finally convinced my superiors to reinitiate our super soldier program," Jerome said while ripping a street sign out of the ground. "Back when our leaders were more competent, no one in their right mind would ever start that program up again. No one in their right mind would allow someone like me into the program. No one in their right mind would allow me to mix gene therapy techniques with tactical steroids. Luckily for me, we are in a grave lack of competency right now, and no one is in their right mind."
With Jerome swinging the hefty steel pole around like a baseball bat, Laney found herself stuck in the position of running and flipping away. A bit too cocky, Laney was caught in mid-cartwheel and sent flying into another storefront. She could feel a hairline fracture in one of her lower ribs, but that wasn't about to stop her. If anything, Laney was now pissed off because that was going to impact her singing performance later on in the evening. She heard broken stringed instruments tossed around her as she rose. To her delight, Laney landed in a small music store. She found a couple of intact lyres and used her bloodline's ability to transform them into unnecessarily large cesti, or battle gloves in modern vernacular, although they appeared more like giant knuckle dusters that encased her entire hands.
Bouncing back, Laney came out swinging. She deflected the next attempt from Jerome with one hand and followed up with a hook to his stomach with the other. The Metal always emphasized body shots during their training. Unrelenting, Laney continued to pile punches into Jerome's gut, causing him to cough up blood as blue as his eyes. Gallagher dropped the street sign and placed both hands on Laney's head as he drove his knee past her punches and into her nose.
"Oh, you piece of…" Laney spits out while wiping her bloody, fractured nose. "I definitely can't perform like this!"
"Perform? What, you think you were just going to beat me up like your bastard of a teacher and go back to what you were doing? No. You are either getting put in the hole for the rest of your life, or I'm putting you in the ground right now."
"Dammit. If I do this, he's gonna find out and never let me live it down."
"What are you on about?"
"I can just hear him now, 'I never have to do that when fighting Jerry. More training is required.'"
"Do what? Ain't nothing you can do that'll help against m-"
Faster than a blink of an eye, Laney cut Jerome off by launching something out of her sleeve into his face. The impact sent him flying through the front windshield of a bus and out the back. While he was distracted, Laney took off the top of her gi and began removing weights similar to The Metal's. The weights cracked the pavement as she dropped them to the ground.
"A while back, I heard that Sensei upgraded his weights to a ton. A ton! Can you believe that? I couldn't at first. But I don't like dragging behind, so I did as well. My joints felt like shit and I threw up blood a few times, but I got used to it fast enough. I don't wear them all the time like he does, but I have been exercising in them five times a day, and it almost feels as good as the five-hundred-pound ones used to."
Stampeding down the street back to Laney, Jerome began picking up cars and throwing them at her. But none of them hit. Without her weights restricting her movement any longer, Laney was simply too fast for him. When Jerome finally caught up to her to deliver a haymaker, she dipped out of the way, grabbed him by the face, and threw him to the ground. He tried to grab her legs, but Laney just kept stomping his head into the pavement over and over again until he stopped squirming about.
Upon seeing him defeated, armed soldiers and field medics descended from the other helicopters to reinforce Jerome. After that display, none of them had the guts to even shoot at Laney as she walked away, giving them all the bird with one hand and clamping her broken nose with the other.
"Now he owes me double for this one."