Star Force: Internecine (SF55) Read Free Page A

knowledge for him to work off of. The full body modification made
sense, but aside from a little hopping around Jason hadn’t been able to do
anything other than fight the pain. He’d got the ability on the first try,
which was probably why he was in such agony. Like when Bo got Sav , this was Jason’s third day of transition and the process
was neither fast nor pleasant.
    But those eyes attested to significant power, and even
as his body complained it now held an impressive new strength. Not the
processing power that Bo possessed, nor the concussive energy that Morgan
wielded, but an entire revamping of his musculature and connective tissue,
including an alteration to his skeleton that essentially gave him the Spartan
treatment from Halo…only with far more impressive results.
    According to Kara the strength was merely a byproduct
of the process, which was designed as an agility upgrade. Jason hadn’t been
able to test it yet and wasn’t going to today either, but he was able to jump
insanely high. His vertical had at least tripled, and that was him only half
trying. He now had a Jedi jump, at least, and was interested in finding out
what else he could do, but right now he was just going to try for a short, slow
run to get his body into some semblance of rhythm.
    He pulled on some shorts and running shoes and headed
for the track, aching with each step as he walked through the restricted
training section of Atlantis where he and his team had been at it for the past
7 years…with ample results. He was now Padawan level
34 and top Archon, two levels ahead of Aaron, and they’d isolated some 7
ascension triggers outside of battlemeld. Vermaire was a bigger beast than
ever, with him still able to beat the crap out of any Archon one on one and
hold his own against 2, but when he threw in his own developing psionics he was
truly a problem for others to try and
deal with.
    Jason’s psionics let him own him, however, so most of
their duels were non-psionic, but put him up against 100 veteran commandos and
he’d tear through them with ease. Vermaire was literally a juggernaut and still
the standard bearer for the Knights, which Jason hoped could at least attain
half of what the Black Knight had accomplished.
    He was also very glad that he was here in the training
group, because he gave the Archons the challenge they needed by beating the
crap out of them time and again, just like in the old days, and they responded
to that challenge in a myriad of ways, occasionally finding a way to take him
down, then he would adapt and counter it with the end result being them both
improving at a remarkable rate. His size, however, was becoming a huge asset.
    Jason and the others had always known that was the
case, which was why they’d created the Knights with the intent of using the
V’kit’no’sat physical enhancements to beef them up to the 7 foot tall range,
with a myriad of other upgrades along with it. What he hadn’t realized was how
much a larger brain helped boost the psionics. In theory was one thing, but
having the Black Knight Fornax and generate a field larger and more potent than
any Jason had ever seen before was chilling.
    And it was chilling because Jason had had the ability
far longer than Vermaire had, yet he had already surpassed him in raw
strength…not duration or accuracy, but in terms of raw power he had more
because he had more brain tissue generating it, essentially a bigger emitter
than Jason would ever have. The trailblazers got stronger with time, but he
would never have as much tissue as a Knight did…and the Zen’zat were all Knight size .
    Above and beyond that, the V’kit’no’sat were larger
still and had so much brain tissue due to their size that their psionics were
going to be difficult to combat. He knew there were ways to go about doing it,
especially the battlemeld techniques that allowed two or more individuals to
essentially share their tissue and amplify their abilities, but Jason