Prism academy demis a l.., p.1
Prism Academy- Demis: A Litrpg Supers Adventure, page 1
Prism Academy: Demis
License Notes: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this e-book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Prism Academy- Demis
Copyright © 2022
David Burke
Cover art copyright
David Burke
Contents
The Story Up to Now-
Chapter 1 - Flexible
Chapter 2 - Menu Options
Chapter 3 - Lists
Chapter 4 - Distractions
Chapter 5 - Key Stats
Chapter 6 - Training Applications
Chapter 7 - Blast Away
Chapter 8 - Lack of
Chapter 9 - Restraint
Chapter 10 - Meat from the Bone
Chapter 11 - Calm Before the Storm
Chapter 12 - Tension
Chapter 13 - Karmic Thread
Chapter 14 - Presented to the World
Chapter 15 - Information Gathering
Chapter 16 - Unwelcome Guests
Interlude 1 - Dark Rage
Chapter 17 - New Developments
Chapter 18 - New Possibilities
Chapter 19 - Evolutions…
Chapter 20 - Coming Clean
Chapter 21 - Getting Slimy
Chapter 22 - Squishy
Chapter 23 - Hope
Chapter 24 - Preparing for the Board
Interlude 2 - Because I Said So
Chapter 25 - Clearing My Mind
Chapter 26 - Integration
Chapter 27 - Optimization
Chapter 28 - Sparring
Chapter 29 - Stat Sheet 1
Interlude 3 - I’ll Take That Bet
Chapter 30 - Talking to Mom
Chapter 31 - Taking it to Them
Chapter 32 - Fighting Our Way In
Chapter 33 - Blowing Off Steam
Chapter 34 - Showdown with the Board
Chapter 35 - Aggressive Courtship
Chapter 36 - Such Interesting Places
Chapter 37 - Gut Check
Chapter 38 - Invited
Chapter 39 - Opening the Gates
Chapter 40 - A Dark Bond
Chapter 41 - What Comes After
Chapter 42 - Stat Sheet 2
Chapter 43 - Fighting Our Way Out
Chapter 44 - Here They Come Again
Chapter 45 - Anvil and Hammer
Chapter 46 - One Company, Two Heads
Chapter 47 - Balancing Bonds
Chapter 48 - Monstrous Hybrid
Interlude 4 - Cause and Effect
Chapter 49 - Mourning the Fallen
Chapter 50 - New Terms
Chapter 51 - Lost in the Work
Chapter 52 - To Catch a Ray
Chapter 53 - Soothing the Soul
Chapter 54 - Karmic Ties
Epilogue
Index
Final Stat Sheet
The Story Up to Now-
The world experienced a major event known as Earthfall when rays of light and shadow covered the Earth. Those infected by the shadow whether human or animal were corrupted into monstrosities. A few who were struck by progenitor rays became a new breed of humanity called supers.
Supers are stronger, faster, and more durable than regular humans. They also have powers within one of the six affinities which are red: bright energy, orange: movement, yellow: sensory, green: metamorph, blue: psychic, and violet: dark energy.
Women who become supers are known as Rays. They have immediate access to their affinity but only have a single affinity. Men who become supers are known as Refractors and have between two and six affinities, but those affinities only become active when they bond with a Ray of the appropriate affinity.
The bonding process is an intimate one which emotionally connects the two for life. It also serves to empower both increasing not only the powers they have evolved but also their capacity to handle progenitor energy.
It has been 178 years since Earthfall, and humanity has not fared well. Mankind has been beaten back to only a little more than a dozen cities. The monsters rule the seas, much of the sky and land as well. The story is set in Chicago initially which is one of the remaining cities which make up the North America Alliance Government. It is hoped that there might be bastions of humanity in other parts of the world, but contact is limited to non-existent.
Over time the number of supers has decreased and the new ones who arise have become weaker. An academy was founded more than 100 years ago by the last Refractor to possess all six affinities. His name was Prism and now any refractor with that ability is known as a prism, or they would be, but none have been born.
That is until Aden Samuels. His past is shrouded in mystery which he doesn’t initially understand but he knows that his parents died when he was fifteen and he ended up in the slums for nine years. Despite being beaten down he never gave up his hope of creating his own business and clawing his way out of the slums. Then through a freak chance he gains the opportunity to take the exam to become a super.
It is a do or die process that will either result in him being corrupted and turned into a monster or becoming a super. During the test an AI which had been implanted in him by his mother becomes active. The AI is known as ANOP. From this AI he learns more about his past but gains more questions.
Aden becomes the first prism in 100 years and the source of a great deal of bickering as the Academy’s board of directors seek to control him for their own purposes. He isn’t the type to be pushed around and so he seeks to chart his own course.
Along the way he bonds three women. First is Jen, called Inferna, a fire powered super who is the heir to a powerful faction within the academy. Then there is Molly, called Aqueous a meta-morph who uses who fluid form in creative ways. Finally, there is Willow, called Precision, who is a sensory based Ray.
Together they help him survive political machinations, an attempt on his life by the Shadow, and an attack which manages to breach the walls of Chicago.
In book 2, Aden is going to be faced with some tough decisions. Some of those may rile you, the reader up. Many of my patrons experienced this but trust me things all end up like they should.
Chapter 1 - Flexible
The drone came at me nearly as fast as a bullet. I had to push myself to dodge it. The thing was tiny, only a little more than four inches long, but it had shocking speed and mobility driven by engines smaller than I had ever thought to see.
It would have been child’s play to smash the little thing. If it had run into me, it would have exploded. Whatever super light compound it was made of couldn’t possibly stand up to my A-rank durability. Or I could have gone to Flame Form and incinerated it. Heck, even Light’s Judgment might have been enough.
Problem was, destroying it wasn’t the point of this exercise. This was just another tortuous drill dreamed up by Lean Man. For such an upright guy, I swear his mind was as twisted as his body could become, at least when it came to dreaming up training exercises.
Of course, he’d simply point out that he was just doing all of this to help me reach my potential as a super. If he wanted to add insult to injury, he’d remind me that the beast wave had only been three days ago, and that I was cleared to miss training for four days. That was the amount of time they thought it would take me to reach a combat worthy level of progenitor capacity after nearly draining myself to empty.
If he really wanted to rub it in, he’d point out that I had three newly bonded Rays waiting for me in my apartment. They had pushed themselves just as hard as I had, but had the common sense to take it easy and recover properly. Not only were they happy to rest back in the apartment, but they were eager to provide me with all types of enticements to keep me there.
I’d succumbed to those enticements yesterday, but I certainly wasn’t going to complain about a moment of that glorious day. The downtime allowed me to realize something. Well, two things.
First off, my capacity was regenerating far faster than I had been led to believe that it would. And second, ANOP made my recovery super-efficient. The AI inside my head—which no one else knew about—was quick to point out that she was optimizing my body as well as improving the connection between us. It still freaked me out a bit that she spoke in my mom’s voice, but given everything I had experienced in the past few days, I just went with it.
She also pointed out that as a Prism, a male super who could access all six of the progenitor rays, it was likely my regeneration rate would be faster than anyone’s. She had extrapolated a guide which suggested that, while it might take a Ray with a single affinity six days to regenerate from 2% to 100%, the rate for Refractors was based on how many affinities a Refractor had.
She hypothesized that the reason it hadn’t been documented by the academy’s administration was that each affinity had a multiplicative effect. As in, a Ray drained to 2% capacity would only regenerate 2% power the first day. Then 4% the next day, followed by 8% on day thr
With six affinities, that would put my natural regeneration at 4.56% for the first day and would have had me fully recharged in less than five days. Of course, as ANOP was quick to point out, that was only my base rate. She had optimized my recharge as much as possible—nearly doubling it—and, only two days after the battle, I was already back up to 54% of my max capacity. In my book, that was enough to train.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to enjoy my bonds. I most certainly did. I felt a lot of affection for and commitment to them—even if ANOP was helping keep my emotional response to the bond at a manageable level. After that monster wave, there wasn’t any time to play around; I had barely been strong enough.
It had almost killed me to win, while Supreme and Bravo had been one mistake away from dying—and we were the lucky ones. During the battle, we lost a Refractor who I didn’t know, both his bonded Rays, and nine other unbonded Rays. They had all died heroes, giving their all to protect humanity.
For all I knew, they had been asshats. But by doing their duty, they served as a spur to me. There was no way I could lay around all day finding new ways to play hide the sausage while there were threats like that monster wave still out there.
We had won, but in a war of attrition, the monsters could probably stand to lose a few thousand of their kind much more easily than humanity could lose a dozen supers. That was why I had to push myself harder. Today’s training was to help me react and move faster.
I possessed the evolution Hyper Accuracy thanks to bonding with Willow—or maybe I should think of her as Precision when it came to super-related stuff. Yet, all it had done was help me aim better punches during the battle with the monster wave.
LM and I had reviewed video footage of my fight and it was clear that economy of motion was something I needed to learn. I won, but I’d done so at a cost. I needed not only to be accurate, but I needed to be precise with how I controlled my body, too.
My mentor was fair. He pointed out that this would take some time; it wasn’t something I could fix overnight. But knowing that supers had died made this feel more urgent. It wasn’t my fault they died—that was on the monsters—but I knew that improving our margin for error was something I could chip away at. Guilt wasn’t a good motivator anyway, but I could use it to fuel a passion to prevent such a close call from happening again.
So here I was dodging this drone. We’d been at it for over an hour, and I was finally getting the hang of it. I hadn’t been touched for at least fifteen minutes. My jukes and twists were all smaller, more refined, more controlled. It wasn’t muscle memory or habit yet, but it was a good start.
I grinned. Then my heightened senses detected a second drone as it entered the fray. I wanted to curse LM under my breath. He hadn’t given me any warning—but then again, neither would monsters.
This one made a beeline for my neck while I was busy twisting around the first one. There was no time for any type of large movement. I needed to think smaller, finer. My head tilted to the side, and I pulled my neck just out of the way. The second drone passed within less than a millimeter of my skin, but it still missed.
A miss was a miss, and I’d take it.
I had no time to pat myself on the back, though, as a third drone was launched. Now LM was just being cruel. I twisted and moved, focusing on each limb separately. My perception was strained, trying to keep up with three targets each moving at me faster than a thousand miles per hour.
LM shouted, “Relax! Stop trying to picture every detail and let your body take over.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I tried to relax. Instead of focusing on tracking each of the drones, I just tried to sense when any of them got close to me. It was more of a strain to focus so hard on listening, seeing, and feeling, than it was to perform the actual physical movements.
ANOP, thankfully, kept quiet. But I could just tell she wanted to take control. That wouldn’t accomplish anything, though. Since reaching level five in optimization, she was better able to help me with fine movements, but I had to learn to do this for myself.
“Dammit,” I cursed as one of the drones touched my left arm. I had been just a fraction of a second too slow. It didn’t hurt me, other than my pride. Still, it motivated me. I was soon doing my best imitation of LM’s super flexible form but without any corresponding superpower.
At one point, I did the splits midair while twisting my torso one way and my head the other—all in an effort to dodge the drones by the narrowest of margins. I had to get faster; I had to be better. So, I kept moving.
With three drones in play now, I couldn’t always dodge them, but I got better hour by hour. LM kept resetting the attack vectors the drones used whenever I got too comfortable avoiding them. Even when it seemed completely random, my mind was starting to find patterns I could exploit.
I knew my optimization with ANOP had to be increasing, but I wasn’t getting further upgrades to my body. The energy from updating my bonds was all used up. I knew I could get more upgrades just by bonding again, but the question was who.
Actually, no… that wasn’t the issue. The bigger issue was how long it would take me to adapt to what I already had before adding to it. I felt like I needed to be in control before I took on another bond.
Hitting optimization level five was supposed to open up a new video from my mom, and ANOP kept insisting that it would be available soon. Then, there was the whole thing with Marissa Leon. Supposedly she knew my mom. I mean, she did know about ANOP, and she’d insisted that I needed to come get her help after reaching level six and before reaching level ten in my optimization with ANOP.
Oddly enough, the more I relaxed and just let the dodging happen naturally, the more I was able to think about other things. It was a strange sensation. It almost felt like an out-of-body experience.
After a particularly acrobatic dodge, I heard one of my bodyguards yell out, “I didn’t know he was that flexible. Are we sure he is really training, and not just trying to show off the goods?”
I didn’t bother responding to the new Ray. She was an Amazonian-looking morpher who had been assigned to my detail. Her hero name was Bumper, although I wasn’t quite sure what her abilities were. Strangely, the fact that she was gorgeous held no appeal for me since I was already bonded to Aqueous, and thus couldn’t bond her. I wondered if that would ever change, and my eye would wander again.
Of course, I didn’t need to respond—Demis responded for me. “From what I hear, he isn’t as interested in finding out how flexible he is as in figuring out how flexible his new bonds are.”
There was a snorting sound before Bumper retorted, “And how would you know that?”
The brunette with blue highlights in her hair grinned. “You weren’t on duty last night. I had to listen to the sounds coming from their bedroom. Trust me, he was testing just how flexible they were. Although, I’m curious if he has tried Aqueous in her Fluid Form.”
Their conversation was definitely distracting, but battlefields were like that. I tried—unsuccessfully—to tune them out to focus exclusively on the drones.
“I’d have thought you’d be more interested in his Rays than in him,” Bumper quipped.
“What? A girl can’t keep her options open?”
That one statement hit on a buried hope I had. I tried to tie it up, put concrete boots on it and then throw it in Lake Michigan, but it kept floating back up to the surface. And teasing comments like that from Demis didn’t help.
