Paul had sensed something, maybe because he wasn’t Saiyan 2 and could slow down a bit more to think. Yet right now Jason was quite active, his hair blonde, and his cells strained with enhanced super speed, but he felt relaxed as he dove in and out of the standing rings that looked like stargates as he zigzagged his way across a long gauntlet of auto-tracking stinger turrets that were throwing the old school stun-laden paintballs in his direction with remarkable accuracy. Enough that if he didn’t move with enough speed they’d wing him. Wilson had made sure of that.
But they didn’t require him to go at his maximum speed. He just had to keep a minimum, and it was a minimum he couldn’t do in base form. In Saiyan 1 he was stretched, but when he went Saiyan 2 the extra speed boost was enough to let him dance through the course with some measure of ease.
So over and over he ran it, and each time he got better at it, given the fact that it was brand new. And what this course had that no other in the history of Star Force had, was constant momentum swings. Jason was having to start and stop, almost completely negating his momentum at each turn, and when doing so you got more out of finesse than trying to keep maximum speed to the target and then slamming on the brakes as hard as you could to reverse course and dash through and around the rings.
Wilson was forcing them to be graceful, not overpowered, and it was working. Jason’s muscles were operating in sync at a level he’d never touched before, all based on movement rather than combat. The smoother he moved, the less energy it took. The less energy it took, the longer he could remain in Saiyan mode. And the way the course was set up, he had to maintain a minimum, meaning it wouldn’t let him slow down too much without getting stunned and slowed, then slowed some more until hundreds, if not thousands, of stings eventually ground you down until you fell unconscious.
Jason knew better than to step onto that slippery hill, so he just adjusted to what he needed to do to stay ahead of the auto-targeting turrets that were covering the ground behind him with blue and green splatters…but the road ahead was clear, and that’s all he needed to worry about. The course would be cleaned before the next run, and there was no doubling back and running multiple loops. It was all one very long course from start to end, taking Jason more than an hour and 12 minutes to complete it previously and covering more than a square mile of Atlantis’s interior parks.
Jason had wondered why Wilson had ordered the demolition of others to create this one, but as he moved through the course some 20 minutes into this session, he could feel his body almost glowing with liquid gold as one of his shoes gave out and ripped slightly as he redirected his momentum again.
That made him roll his ankle, but he recovered quickly and babystepped through his deceleration before launching the other way off his good foot and staying ahead of the stingers raining down very close to his right shoulder as he went back up the ‘V’ trajectory and through the entry side of the ring that led to a short straightway up to the next one.
Jason didn’t stop, instead adjusting to the torn shoe and looking at it as an additional challenge. When he got to the next reversal, he made sure to plant the weight of his last step on the good shoe, and in doing that he was able to keep most of his speed as the other one gave a little too much with each footfall, but it hadn’t disintegrated like Kerrie’s had last week. Part of him was still laughing at seeing her wipe out so spectacularly, but that just attested to how much momentum they were carrying with a combination of their mass and speed, and there was no way they could handle these redirects so fast while barefoot. The friction would be too much, so the shoes were a necessity, but the rest of Jason was only covered in a pair of skintight shorts.
A shirt would have only slowed him down with the air drag, and the others had learned to shed as much clothing as possible to goose their times. Jason’s run at a new personal record was shot now, but he was still going to finish it out if his shoe held up enough, because he was having fun with it now…for it was a new challenge spontaneously thrown at him, and one he had never faced before.
So he kept going, out of sync because one foot landed softer than the other one, but he adjusted to it by eating up his speed cushion that he’d developed earlier, but he was still staying just ahead of the stingers most of the time, while taking a few brushing hits here and there that numbed the skin where they made brief contact on his flailing arms.
He wanted to use Essence to denumb them, but didn’t want to break the trend he had going. He made it another 26 minutes, feeling rather good about himself as he happily struggled to stay ahead of pace with the shoe liability…then something snapped. But not in the shoe.
Jason shot right through the next ring rather than going behind it and coming out the correct way. He ran out of bounds and slowed to a halt as the stingers pelted him with dozens of shots, but he held up a hand and blocked them with a bioshield until the control room monitoring the runs saw his raised hand and deactivated the course.
Jason stayed put, feeling good, but
