Wilson was short of words for a long time after his mother completed the story. He quietly hugged her. Everything she had done, no matter how selfish, she had done to protect him and cure him from the curse.
"Thank you mom. You are the best mom I could ever ask for."
Silvia smiled and sniffled.
Charlie glanced at them from his lying position on the grass and sighed. They were still not done. Come on. They were only separated for about a year or so. What was there to catch up on for so long.
'They are hugging again.' He grumbled under his breath. 'I should download some offline games in case of another time. Uh! I'm so bored. Finish up, man.'
He dared not say it out loud though. He was not stupid. A woman who had access to spatial magi-tech and could exonerate his father's name from the long list of deceased traitors was definitely not simple. She even had connections in Tiger City itself. He wasn't stupid enough to test her patience after a long awaited reunion with her son.
'With all what she has done, a couple hours doesn't matter.' Charlie concluded and went back to testing the limits of his surprisingly rich imagination.
Wilson stared into his mother's eyes and asked her a question.
"The curse. Is that why I always wanted to wrestle?"
"Yes." Silvia responded.
"And that's why you tried to dissuade me from leaving the village?" Wilson asked again.
"That and the fact that they might recognize you."
"Do you still want me to give up on wrestling?"
"With all my heart." Silvia nodded.
Wilson said nothing else. He dropped his head and turned away to hide his disappointed expression.
Silvia sighed. Her voice shook.
"Wilson. You know I love you and I want you to be happy. You know your desire to wrestle is an effect of the curse."
Wilson faced her.
"But what if it is not?"
Silvia was slightly confused.
"What do you mean?" She asked.
"What if it is not the curse affecting my choice to wrestle like you think? The curse said die fighting, not wrestling. I could have died many times before while fighting, but I didn't. And you know, those times I nearly died, it wasn't even a thing of choice. I was in between a rock and a hard place. The snow tiger, the Forest City nobles, The apes, the one-eyed beasts, the bounty hunters...."
"What about the time you fought against Dash's father and the fight against that Gene kid?"
"At least those ones were my choice. I could have surrendered but chose not to. I chose to fight them to the bitter end. That was on me. A personal choice, unlike all the others. You once told me to have no regrets. At the very least, dying while wrestling will leave me with no regrets. Please mom! And if you think about it, don't you think with how much I have suffered and survived, the curse might have been cured?"
Silvia stared at her son for a long time and finally sighed.
"Big brother is right. They grow up too fast." She grumbled.
Wilson frowned. He heard that.
"I have an actual uncle?" He could not help but ask.
"Two. You've met one of them already."
"Who?"
"You will know when he chooses to let you know." Silvia carried an air of mystery when she said that. Wilson wanted to say something but she beat him to it.
"And about the wrestling thing." She continued. Wilson unconsciously sat straight. "We will make a deal. Principal Cobain's son, the one who killed Dale, has registered. I will make sure his team faces yours in your very first. If you can win convincingly, and I repeat, convincingly, then you can continue wrestling. Mind you, I'm never going to get involved in the match in anyway asides pulling the strings to set you both up against each other. If you can't even beat a person you have bad blood against, then you can forget about it."
Wilson beamed. He tried to hug his sweet, loving mother. She pushed him back.
"I'm not done! There won't be any do-overs. You will face Cobain's son. Colt is actually very skilled and has loads of experience with his complicated stealth ability and you can bet that he won't be holding back against you. So, you better be at your best. If there's ever a time when you could make me change my mind about you having such a dangerous career, it would be during the match."
Wilson beamed even wider and hugged Silvia.
"Thank you, mom. I love you."
Charlie saw it and his eyes instantly welled up. Oh, how he misses his father.
"Oh, and you do have an ability. The lame, archaic AIs you've been subjected to are too dumb to identify mutated ability cells. We don't know what the mutations have done to you but now that you've awakened, you better start working on controls and stuff." Silvia said.
"Are you going to train me?" Wilson asked.
"Only if you can convince me to." Was Silvia's response.
Wilson instantly summoned the smile he always used as a kid when trying to get his mom to get him something he wanted.
"Mommy. Do you know how much I love...."
She cut him off.
"Not now! After your first match."
Wilson's smile fell. Silvia laughed.
They spent another couple hours talking and laughing, unknowingly making Charlie jealous.
Poor Charlie even wondered if it would be alright to join in on the fun. Poor lonely Charlie!
Wilson did not know something though. His mother had neglected telling him that the curse had been gotten rid of ever since the time she killed Agnes and that everything Wilson had gone through was all his sheer bad luck. Why? Because she didn't see a need to.
***************
A couple days later. Wilson was at the gym the team had discovered in the building they lived in. Horr came visiting the previous day and somehow, at the end of the day, the team ended up with their first sponsors; Horr and Barnes.
There were some couple hundred teams that had registered for the competition and finding a sponsor so early on was no easy feat. Wilson had no idea how Charlie and Instructor had managed to convince someone like Horr that investing in the team so early on was a good idea. As for Barnes, he did not even appear. As soon as Horr decided being a sponsor was a good idea, Barnes jumped into the boat.
The regulations were simple. Every day, two random teams will face off against each other. The team to win three out of five matches would be considered. It did not mean they qualified though. The group of judges would still have to determine if they skilled enough to be counted into the top 64. These 64 teams will be grouped into 16 groups of four each. Each team will face off against the other teams of the same group and will be graded by their win ratio. The team with the highest win will then qualify for the round of sixteen. At that point, loss was not even a consideration.
Anyway, back to Wilson. The Trainwrecks were having their first match against a team named The Forest Monkeys in eight days time. It was a new team like the Trainwrecks. Not that Wilson put much thought into it, presently. He sat down on a mat, his phone laid in front of him as he followed a basic breathing routine that was supposed to help him get a feel for his ability.
His ability was something his mom had chosen to call Blood Control. It was a variation of a rare ability that gave Wilson the power to control his own blood flow in and outside his body. It also allowed him to control to s certain extent, the blood of others. The more Wilson thought about it, the scarier it got.
Did that mean that when he became proficient at using his ability, he would be able to stop someone's heart from pumping blood or keep the blood from flowing into certain parts of the body? He could literally paralyse a person or even kill if the disparity was high enough. What about if he bled? He could simply sneak in attacks using his dripping blood or maybe even the exposed blood of the opponent. So many possibilities but right now, he couldn't even move his own exposed blood if he tried.
Wilson closed his eyes and tried to control his blood. Charlie, the instructor, Dash, Sofia, Danny, Fawn and Gene Chang walked into the gym turned training area. The place instantly became noisy.
"Hey guys, I need help." Wilson finally asked for help. He was tired of trying to figure it out himself.
They all looked at him. Their faces carried different emotions. Gene Chang looked at Wilson as if he was not supposed to ask for help. Danny looked like he was about to cry. Dash looked like he wanted to make fun of Wilson. Fawn and Sofia looked excited and Charlie and Instructor merely smiled calmly like old wizened sages.
Very quickly, they all surrounded him.
"What do you wanna know?"
"How do you guys control your abilities?"
Danny immediately spoke up.
"Don't ask me. I used to think I was better than you ability-wise only to find out that I was the one who could never compare to you." He complained out loud. He had the sparsest, least quality genes of the team. His strength ability was there,but it barely made him stronger than Wilson.
"Ignore him." Fawn said. "Think of it like a fifth limb. You can control it yet not control it..."
Dash chuckled.
"We already have a fifth limb. We can control it and yet we can't." He said, laughing.
Fawn shook her head.
"Think of it this way. When using your ability the first time, how did it feel? You have to go back to that feeling again. Emotions are a powerful trigger for most abilities. Yours might be one of them." Gene Chang tried to give his own bit of advice. It made Wilson look at him in a different light.
Sofia quickly joined in. "Edward taught me to think about what I want my ability to do without putting too much energy into my thoughts."
"You need to think of it like an emotional, haywire robot. It can follow orders but its programming is messed up. So, what you do is , try to convince using the emotions it identifies while slowly reprogramming it to suit your needs." The instructor said.
Wilson nodded even though he did not understand her much.
"Seems like there are various methods to controlling one's abilities." He concluded.
"Charlie?"
"Don't look at me, my ability was activated from birth. People with ability cells as dense as ours awaken very early in life. Early enough that they don't even remember what it felt like two years later." Charlie continued. "What you should do is to trigger that emotion like Gene said. Use the emotion as well as you can. Control the emotion and use that emotion to control your ability while reprogramming like my babe said."
The team's eyes opened wide. Charlie's eyes opened wide. What a mistake.
"My what?" Danny asked.
"No fucking way." Dash said. Wilson looked to and fro. Did he miss something?
Sofia and Fawn giggled while winking at their instructor.
Wilson took a deep breath and remembered the fight against Gene. What did he feel? Disappointment, rage, frustration, pain. What was the strongest felling though? The need to survive. The need to win. The need for control. What was his last thought that he remembered thinking?
He wanted control over his own life.
Blood instantly seeped out of his body and covered him in less that two seconds like a full body armor, complete with a helmet and shoes.
Immediately, the bantering and teasing stopped. Everyone hurriedly stepped away from Wilson as he stood up and floated a meter above the floor. "Urgh! The stench of blood is very strong!" Danny complained. Sofia nodded in agreement as she scrunched her nose.
But a stronger feeling emanated from him and the others could feel it. It was Elegance, Confidence, Power, Oppression and Pride.
"I think this is how I used to imagine the king would be like." Charlie whispered.
"It needs a cool name that screams power." Dash said.
"Like what?"
"Like... The Emperor's Bloodline."