My Only Familiar Is Me[A Late-Blooming Evolution Story]

What does it take to build the perfect trap? Millions in military funding and cutting-edge futuristic engineering? Those certainly improve the odds, but they are not the heart of it. Our ancestors hunted saber-toothed tigers without thermal optics or sniper rifles. The single most important element of any trap is disorientation. You lead your enemy straight to the point of no return, where the brain finally realizes something is wrong, but physics and momentum have already made the outcome inevitable.

That was exactly the equation our platoon had just walked into.

We were moving at a steady pace across the wet, sucking jungle floor toward the fortified Loz’an outpost when the ground beneath our feet simply vanished. The world dropped away, and we were suddenly in freefall.

[Tactical Mode Activated.]

A familiar click echoed through the back of my skull. The processor in my head, running flat out, instantly froze the chaos into a still image, while my mental projection slipped free of my body, giving me a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield.

Our entire platoon was plunging like sacks of grain into a deep man-made ravine. At the bottom, Loz’an engineers had prepared a primitive but brutally effective killing field: a forest of massive steel spikes aimed straight at the soles of our boots. Their tips were not forged from ordinary alloy. They were made from a rare heavy metal native to their homeworld, one that instantly heated to nearly five hundred degrees Celsius from the slightest friction. I could already see the spikes glowing white-hot from within, with the air above them rippling in waves of shimmering heat. On impact, that metal would punch through the lower sections of our armor as effortlessly as a red-hot knife slicing through butter.

My eyes swept over the soldiers falling around me. There was no panic anywhere. Everything had happened too fast. One man wore a focused frown, another still had his mouth half open in the middle of a sentence, trying to finish a thought for his squadmate, while someone else was actually falling with the sleepy expression of a man caught in the middle of a yawn. Not one of them had realized that in exactly four seconds, they would cease to exist.

Only beneath Danny’s boots had the first orange sparks already begun to flicker. That was the muscle memory of a veteran. Before his brain had even identified the threat, his body had triggered his levitation ability on pure instinct.

Ted and Mary were dropping beside me. In theory, both of them could stay airborne, but neither had the split-second reflexes that only came from experience under real combat pressure. My hands were already moving on autopilot, reaching for the backs of their tactical vests to grab them.

At the same time, I sent the mental command to my thumbs to hit the controllers, intending to deploy solid platforms of compressed S-Power beneath my boots. Then I caught the problem out of the corner of my eye. Every indicator on my wrist was dark. The armor was dead. The suit’s entire power network had been completely disabled. Every soldier around me was dealing with exactly the same failure.

Everything clicked into place. The enemy had detonated a localized electromagnetic pulse in this sector, frying or disabling every piece of standard military electronics. Now it made perfect sense why the bottom of the pit held no sophisticated laser grid, only crude red-hot steel that did not care about an EMP. It also explained why our Tech Sense specialist had never warned us during the march. His ability simply could not detect a trap built without a single microchip.

A couple of yards farther down our path of descent, I noticed something else. One of the Loz’an soldiers was falling onto the spikes with us. From what I could tell, the kamikaze had stretched his elastic body across the pit like a living net, waited until our entire vanguard stepped onto him, then suddenly snapped back into shape and dragged the whole platoon down with him. The suicide soldier was heading for the blazing spikes right alongside us.

The Loz’an never hesitated to spend resources, whether equipment or lives, if it meant accomplishing the mission. Ruthless. Totalitarian. Efficient.

The seconds of [Tactical Mode] were running out, and the frozen image was beginning to tremble. I had no doubt I could survive. My body’s own reserves were enough to compensate for the loss of my equipment. But if I wanted to pull everyone else out of this death trap, my only chance was to bet on the instincts buried inside them and hit them with the sharpest command I could deliver.

[Tactical Mode Deactivated.]

”Armor’s dead!” I barked over, boiling the warning down to the fewest possible words instead of wasting precious fractions of a second. At almost the same instant, I hauled both teenagers toward me by the backs of their vests and formed a solid invisible platform beneath my boots using nothing but my own energy, bypassing the suit’s dead systems. ”Grab whoever’s closest and get up!”

I locked myself in place a couple of yards above the shimmering heat, keeping Ted and Mary suspended beside me while silently praying my shout had been enough to jolt their instincts awake.

It wasn’t enough for everyone.

I had to throw myself sideways, breaking my own trajectory to intercept another falling frontline soldier and catch him across my back. When nearly two hundred pounds of flesh and composite armor slams onto your spine without warning, it is a uniquely miserable experience, but my back and muscles held. Thankfully, his survival instincts took over. He clamped himself around my neck and torso like a terrified monkey, finally stopping his uncontrolled plunge.

The bottom of the pit answered with a hideous sound. A savage, wet hiss of flesh charring rose from below, followed by the unmistakable gurgle of a body coming apart as the Loz’an suicide soldier drove himself onto his own white-hot spikes. The creature’s liquid brain boiled within seconds, venting from its skull in a plume of pale steam.

Two more of our assault troopers came within inches of sharing his fate, but Danny got his bearings in midair. Propelled by the raw thrust of his fire gift and trailing a shower of sparks, he dove like a missile and ripped both men off the spike tips at the last possible instant. The exposed skin on their necks blistered immediately under the brutal heat pouring off the metal, but they were alive.

The rest of the platoon, made up mostly of battle-hardened veterans and seasoned scouts from First Group, managed to stabilize themselves. The stronger soldiers caught those who had not recovered in time, spreading the load between them. Zero losses. We had made it through.

Without waiting for orders, the entire platoon surged upward as one, racing across invisible energy footholds and out of that suffocating furnace.

Back in training, the tactical instructors drilled one lesson into our heads over and over. This was exactly why only Awakened operatives were sent through portals. In a straight technological contest, humanity did not just lose to the aliens, we got crushed. No matter how brilliant Selina’s engineering might be back in her lab, the enemy fighting on its own home ground was almost always more advanced. The unique abilities carried by every operative were our only hidden ace. No matter how flawless or mathematically perfect an alien trap appeared, there was always one variable no one could predict: the superhuman ability of a single soldier capable of dragging everyone else back from the edge.

”What the hell was that?!” Ted shouted, blinking in panic as he squirmed under my left arm, desperately trying to find something solid beneath his feet.

”Put me down! I can fly on my own!” Mary snapped from my right, twisting furiously in my grip.

I ignored both of them. Cold logic said we got clear of the kill zone and secured solid ground before I started letting anyone go. On a battlefield, safety was temporary at best.

The instant I vaulted over the edge of the ravine and dropped the two teenagers, along with the two-hundred-pound assault trooper who was still hanging around my neck, Loz’an infantry came pouring out of the dense undergrowth straight at us.

Popular culture loves to romanticize the idea of genius. People treat it like something mystical, almost divine, as though geniuses are born once a century or chosen by the stars. That is nonsense. From a neurobiological standpoint, genius is simply the result of winning the genetic lottery, inheriting unusually flexible neural pathways and extraordinary processing speed.

Thanks to relentless training and the mental bonuses I earned with every new level of my [Trainer] class, my brain was operating at the very limit of human biology. I could solve ten-digit equations in my head faster than Guinness World Records champions. I did not even need to activate [Tactical Mode] to read the enemy formation charging toward us. My accountant’s mind balanced the threat assessment almost instantly.

Twenty-five infantry. No laser rifles. No chemical sprayers. The sky above was clear. Apparently, their own EMP blast had knocked out their advanced equipment as well. It did not matter. They had come prepared to fight with Stone Age simplicity. The front rank raised tower shields and long spears in perfect unison. Behind them advanced a dense line of ranged troops. Instead of conventional weapons, they stretched their elastic palms into oversized slingshots, loading them with balls forged from that same heat-reactive alloy. One second to draw them back, and the projectiles would come screaming toward us, heating to white-hot temperatures in flight and punching straight through flesh. Our suits’ defensive energy fields were offline, and I seriously doubted even a third of the platoon could raise personal shields in time.

Our commander, Leon, was a seasoned veteran who had already proved that several times today. But human reaction speed had biological limits. He simply did not have enough time to issue orders. I had to take over.

”Mary, telekinesis! Put every one of those shots into the dirt!” I roared as the aliens’ living slings snapped forward with a sharp crack. ”Danny, hit the whole line! Burn ’em!”

Fortunately, those two were fast. Mary reacted flawlessly. A dense volley of glowing metal spheres swerved only a couple of yards before reaching us, then slammed into the purple mud with a violent hiss. Danny shot above the treetops in an instant, unleashing a massive stream of concentrated fire. The rest of the platoon joined the counterattack immediately. Everything we had went flying toward the Loz’an. Ted hurled a blazing sphere of plasma, while Leon and I launched dense blasts of S-Power straight from our hands.

Then something happened that none of us expected.

A strange shimmering wave spread across the Loz’an ranks, woven from millions of translucent soap bubbles. The sight was utterly surreal. The ghostly barrier worked like a perfect sponge. Each bubble disappeared with a soft pop as it swallowed Danny’s flames, absorbed Ted’s plasma, and dissolved our S-Power blasts, carrying the remaining energy harmlessly into the artificial sky.

Beautiful. And a complete disaster for us. The enemy line had not lost a single soldier, and they were already coolly preparing another volley of white-hot metal.

Just as our instructors had taught us, one powerful Awakened could completely rewrite the math of a battle. The problem was that this time, the joker belonged to the Loz’an.