39 RESTLESS

"Rex! Wake up!"

"I'm up." Rex felt like he never went to sleep. Even as he opened his overslept eyes and found himself back in his berrics bunk.

Tyson leaned over him in his bottom bunk with only boxers on as other privates and higher ranks got dressed all around them.

"You sure? Cause you were really gone for a minute there man. Mumbling about someone being fifteen... which is totally not weird."

"Yea. It's not." Rex pushed Tyson's head out of his bunk space and got up to sit upright on his bed.

As he gripped his bed, he looked down at his fingers and realized two of them were swollen and red as all hell.

"Guess it's not all a dream. That sucks." Rex commented before thinking, "Well…. even then."

He pulled up his system screen.

***

[Name: Kalico Rex]

[Age: 17 Years old]

[Height: 5ft 8In/172 Cm]

[Weight: 215 Lbs/97.5Kgs]

[Race: Primordial Shape-Shifter/ Panthera Sapien]

[Level: 11 (350/1200)]

[Stat Points: 1]

[Skill Points: 0]

[HP: (280/300)]

[MP: (196/200)]

[STR: 20]

[SPD: 18]

[STMN: 10]

[DEX: 15]

[LCK: 5]

[CNTRL: 4 (+10)]

[WILL: 10]

[INT: 12]

[SKILLS\ABILITIES: (Nine Lives LV1), (Blade Sense LV1), (Acrobatics LV1), (Vantage Vision LV1) (Night-Hunter: Unactive), (Predator's Frenzy: 50%), (Lunacy: 0%) (Barbed Tongue LV1), (Lion-Drake Fangs LVB)

[Elemental Affinities: (Jungle-Fire), (Solar-Sand), (….?), (….?)].]

[Authority: (Warrior's Authority), (Guardian's Authority), (….?), (…?)]

***

Rex smiled, "Hell yea."

As he got up, he found the shadowed shapes of the other trainees blow by. He'd only just been working with them— and fighting others a matter of hours ago, but after the nights events, it felt like years ago.

All exaggerations aside, he was time displaced.

"Day goes on. Moon gets fuller." Rex said and approached his locker. His martial skin hung from a hook inside. With no need to shower since he did the night before, he began to slip into the suit.

"Oh— hello, did someone get a visit from the Price family Princess in the middle of the night?"

Rex turned around and found Syrus standing behind him with his martial skin on and unzipped causing it to fit loosely around his arms and neck.

"Jokes over, spider-boy." Rex said as he pulled on his suit and strapped himself in.

"Where's the joke? Cause I can point out the scar? Well, they look too new to be scars." Syrus said as he checked out Rex.

In a panic, Rex hurried up and strapped himself into his suit. "You're hallucinating. No one can see right now, it's like pre-early morning."

Syrus smiled knowingly and nodded, "Alright, alright. Be that way. You're lucky I don't add fuel to the fire with how you backstabbed me yesterday."

"Right." Rex replied as he felt the tears in his skin slide against the tightening martial-skin. The mana flowing from the mana-stone at the nape of his neck thrummed with flowing energies that brought his suit to life. "Thank god I started that rumor I'm dating Imani. Perfect excuse…. to hell with stocks."

"Don't worry. I know the terms we operate on now." Syrus grinned—

"Give it a rest, man. It's too early for all this." Victor said as he left the restroom fully suited. His dreads were tied up at the back of his head messily. Obviously, he was in a rush like everyone else.

"Victor—" Rex called after him as he pushed his way out of his bed space that was slowly filling with other privates.

"What's up, man?" Victor said as he walked back to his bunk and pulled his weapon from his locker. It was a gauntlet that functioned as a sword and riot-shield and a belt with a holstered handgun. A Fauve trademarked weapon known as a Lurcher Pistol.

"Can you hit me with a healing wave before our morning session really quick? I guess I slept wrong." Rex held up his sprained fingers to Victor. 

"Oh, for sure." Victor's eyes turned golden. Matching colored tiger stripes of fire danced across his arms and back as a healing wave of golden dust flowed from him in lively pulses. 

Rex felt the bones in his fingers begin to reform and the cuts on his back begin to knit themselves back together beneath fading scabs. 

"Gotta stay in shape. You've got enemies like I do now. Worse, probably." Victor said and the two shared a laugh. 

As Rex turned to walk out of the barracks with Victor, he stopped from almost crashing into the blonde-haired trainee standing ahead of him. 

"Hunter." Rex said.

"You're not even supposed to be awake for another hour or so since you're not an Inheritance Ability user." Victor said. 

"No need to tell me what I already know." Hunter hissed, "This is about what I don't know." 

"Stop talking in riddles. We have places to be." Rex moved over to walk past him.

Hunter stepped to the side to stay in front of Rex. His golden hair was a spiky mess in the dark, "I don't know why you're lying." 

"What?" Rex and Victor shared a glance. 

"You're not dating Imani." Hunter said. "But you're letting articles and tabloids say whatever— you're letting them tarnish her family name. You won't even release a statement. I don't know why but it feels like a distraction. The question is, a distraction from what?" 

Victor laughed in a hushed whisper, "You've really gotta let the Rex hate go man."

"Do you not respect your families customs either?" Hunter looked at Victor. 

"Which family?" Victor asked seriously. "Which one do you care about really?"

Rex was taken aback by Victor's sudden willingness to fight with words. 

Hunter looked at him seriously, "The one that can play a part in saving the world, obviously."

Before Victor could reply or ash the stringent recruit, he looked back to Rex, "You haven't made sense since the moment you hopped on that train, Kalico. I think it's all related. And I don't think you want me to know that. Someone like you doesn't get upgrades like this overnig—"

Rex's hand moved before his mind could register the action. 

He punched Hunter in the face and knocked him out stone cold on the barracks floor. 

"I need to do something about him." Rex thought seriously before looking around in the half-empty barracks then back to Victor. 

"Put him back to bed?" Victor suggested. 

Rex nodded, "Yea. He'll just think it was a bad dream."

They approached the unconscious recruit and reached down to lift him. As soon as their hands were within arms reach, Hunter's tattoo's rose up off his skin with dark-gold electrical outlines. 

Shadowy wolves heads snapped at them. Ape arms swung. Armadillo skin spread in the form of a shielding second skin. 

They both jumped back to avoid the chaotic defensive assault. 

"I didn't know he could do that subconsciously." Victor mumbled. 

"Me neither." Rex said, "Guess he can thank the tatts for sleeping on the floor for the rest of the night."

"Who knows, maybe it'll teach him some humility." Victor and Rex headed out of the barracks to fall in step with the others who had already left for their early-early morning training.

"That's not a thing with these folks." Rex replied as they headed for the door on the bottom floor. 

Someone woke up briefly and told them to shut-up or die broke. A recruit on the bunk next to them with red highlights was dreaming about eating rare fish with gold plated Bowie knives off the backs of supermodels. 

"Guess it's just us then." Victor said. 

"I'm tired of being humble." Rex thought, "Not that I ever really was. I'm just broke. But I'm tired of that too."

They approached the door out of the barracks. The fading scent of rich jungle night air swept under the cracks carrying scents of flowers, goblins, dead animals and something akin to lions. 

He was sure of it after spending a day in a desert full of them. 

Something leonine was waiting outside the barracks. 

He stopped. He could hear their breaths fall short as he came closer. 

Victor stopped, "What?"

"How often do Canine-Unit Operatives come near here?" Rex whispered with a hand close to his dual assault-axes. 

"Rarely. They're like the jungle-monkey unit. A defensive measure that follows commands from the Alpha-General directly— only they're usually for specialized tracking. Not subterfuge and retrieval." Victor explained.

Rex suddenly relaxed. "The Alpha-General. Right." 

He approached the door.

The Cerberus Shepherds on the other side went nuts. Their howlish roars echoed through the night and woke up both male and female barracks members alike. 

Rex stepped outside to the two Canine-Unit Operatives wrangling their hybrid beasts with shock-sticks and steel-muzzles. 

"The hell is up with you two this week?" One of them groaned. A male with a grisly slash wound over his eye and spiked grey hair. 

Rex didn't want to give them any room to suspect the creatures disciplinary undoing was thanks to him so he stayed behind Victor and made no attempts to speak to or calm his partial-kin. Even as the other recruits woke up angrily. 

"Private Kalico Rex of the Spot-Back Boys Male Recruit Division?" The grey-haired operative said. 

"Here, sgt." Rex said, taking note of the grey spiky haired operatives rank tag over his left breast shield. Nothing more than a silver circlet around a star that spoke to his Drift Dimension level clearance. A silver ranked one star operative had seen some things.

As Rex would soon if what he thought was coming was true.

"It's time for my rank up."