Chapter 330: Upset Summer

Summer stood at the edge of the clearing for a moment longer than she meant to, her brain working through what her eyes were seeing.

Her father, standing. Upright, composed, hands loose at his sides like he’d spent the afternoon on a leisurely walk.

Ryan, on the ground. Not resting but down.

His chest was heaving in ragged pulls, sweat soaking through everything he was wearing, one palm flat against the dirt in what appeared to be an ongoing negotiation with his own body about whether standing was still a realistic option. A thin thread of blood traced its way from the corner of his mouth and dripped quietly into the grass below him.

Her father glanced down at Ryan sternly.

"F...Father!"

Summer broke from the entrance and crossed the grass quickly, her voice coming out sharper than she usually let things come out.

"What in the world are you doing to him?!"

Marlon turned at her voice.

"Training him," he said simply, then glanced back down at Ryan as though checking on the progress of something he’d left to simmer. "The boy is strong but he has no technique. So I’m teaching him."

"By beating him like this?!" Summer stopped a few feet away, staring at him at a loss. Then she turned the stare on Ryan. "You... how are you losing this badly? Don’t you have superhuman strength? Isn’t that the entire point of you?"

Ryan made a sound from the ground that was somewhere between a groan and an attempt at a response.

"He’s in a weakened state," Marlon said.

Summer turned back to her father. "Weakened how?"

"Look at his neck."

She looked. The collar sat there against Ryan’s throat, dull and foreign-looking, clearly not something that belonged in this world, or at least not in any world she’d grown up in.

"That’s a Starakian weapon I obtained from a Starakian," Marlon said explained. "Specifically designed to work against Symbiote Hosts. It suppresses them, weakens the bond, shuts down most of what they can draw on. Makes them considerably easier to fight. Or kill, depending on the intention."

The silence that followed was occupied entirely by Summer’s expression cycling through several things at once.

"Then why," she said, dumbfounded, "is he wearing it?"

"Training purposes," Marlon replied, with a small sigh that suggested he found her concern slightly exhausting. "If I let him fight me at full strength, he overwhelms me in seconds and learns nothing from it. I needed to bring the forces into balance."

Summer looked at Ryan on the ground. At the blood. At the way his hands were shaking. Then she looked back at her father.

"You call that balance?" she said. "Father, it looks like he’s about to produce an internal organ onto the grass."

"Because I pushed him hard," Marlon said, entirely without apology. "Which was the point. He doesn’t know how to fight, not properly. He’s been throwing his fists around like a boy in a schoolyard brawl and relying on brute force to close the gap. That’s not fighting." He said quite harshly, and Ryan, to his credit, didn’t argue it, even from the ground, even through what was clearly a significant amount of pain. He just shot Marlon a look that communicated several things, none of them polite condensed into a deep glare.

"And what exactly did you expect from a high schooler?!" Summer turned on her father fully now, any remaining veneer of composure folding up and stepping aside. Her fist connected with Marlon’s side, not hard enough to mean anything physical, but hard enough to mean something. "You muscle-head dad! He is one year older than me, do you understand that? One year."

"One year older with a Symbiote bonded to him," Marlon replied, crossing his arms.

"A Symbiote you just switched off," Summer shot back, "which means right now, for all practical purposes, you have been spending the last several hours beating up someone who is functionally just a regular teenager, which is exactly what I am, by the way, thank you very much!"

"If you think this boy is a regular teenager, even in his current state, you’re mistaken." Marlon’s eyes moved to Ryan again, and something shifted in them. "Even with everything suppressed, even worn down to this, he’s still not ordinary. That much is plain."

Summer opened her mouth, found she didn’t have an immediate counter to that point, and pivoted.

"Check your priorities," she said seriously. "He is bleeding, Father. He needs rest, not more of whatever this is."

"He’s fine. And we haven’t quite finished—"

"Father."

She said it once. And she smiled, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Marlon stopped immediately.

He cleared his throat quickly.

"Very well," he said. "You may take him to rest."

Then he looked down at Ryan one final time, and the brief softness — if it had ever been there, was gone, replaced by that stern assessing stare.

"And you, boy. Tomorrow we resume. Early." He let the words settle before adding. "I hope you won’t fold as quickly as you did today. This was a rather pathetic showing from someone who goes around playing the hero."

Ryan just glared stronger at him.

"F...fuck off, old man..." Ryan’s voice came out wrecked, barely held together, but the feeling behind it was perfectly intact.

Marlon chuckled as if he had been praised and turned and walked away through the long grass without looking back.

Summer watched him go for a moment, then turned and crouched down in front of Ryan. Up close it was somehow worse, the exhaustion written into every line of his face, the way his breathing was still working to catch up, the grass-stained knees, the blood drying at the corner of his mouth. The collar still sitting at his throat tightened closely to his chest that she wondered if it wasn’t choking him.

"Are you okay?" She asked, really concerned.

"Y...yeah, I’m fine," Ryan managed, nodding with what appeared to be significant effort.

He shifted his weight, pressed both palms against the ground, and tried to push himself upright.

He made it maybe halfway before something in the attempt gave out and he came back down with a short grunt, one knee hitting the grass, head dropping briefly before he caught himself.

"Careful—" Summer’s hand shot out instinctively as Ryan shifted. "The collar.... I’ll get it off. Just don’t move."

She reached toward his neck with steady fingers, and then immediately pulled her hand back with a sharp yelp, recoiling like she’d touched something alive.

"I — I can’t!" She shook her hand out, staring at her fingers. "It shocked me. It actually shocked me."

"Your father got it," Ryan said. "So go ask your father."

"Right... just stay here," she said, already straightening up, already moving.

She was gone at a jog before he could respond.

Not that he was going anywhere.

Ryan let his eyes close and his cheek settle against the cool grass with the full cooperation of a body that had completely stopped negotiating. The ground was solid and still and that was enough right now.

Marlon hadn’t gone easy. That was perhaps the understatement of the afternoon. What it had been, stripped of any framing, was a one-sided beating delivered by him.

It annoyed Ryan. Of course it annoyed him, some part of him was always going to bristle at being taken apart that thoroughly, at being made to feel that small and that outmatched. That part was loud right now, sitting somewhere behind his sternum, making itself known.

But underneath the annoyance was something else.

He knew Marlon wasn’t doing this out of cruelty. Or, not entirely out of cruelty, he amended privately, because the man clearly wasn’t suffering through the experience. But the point of it was real. The lesson was real.

Because today had shown him, with complete and humbling clarity, exactly how wide the gap was between what he’d thought he was and what he actually was when you stripped the Symbiote away and left just him. Just Ryan. Just a seventeen year old who’d been getting by on something borrowed, fighting like a blunt instrument because the instrument had always been heavy enough that precision didn’t seem to matter.

His teeth pressed together slowly.

The bitterness that moved through him at that thought wasn’t directed at Marlon. It was directed inward, at the comfortable assumption he hadn’t even known he’d been making, that strength was the same thing as capability. That having power meant knowing how to use it.

Today had been a very thorough argument against that position.

He didn’t know how long Summer had been gone. Long enough for the light to shift slightly, long enough for the grass under his cheek to stop feeling cold. More than ten minutes, probably. Maybe more than that.

"You still awake?"

Her voice came from behind him finally.

"Barely," he said honestly.

"Don’t move, I’ve got it." Footsteps through the grass, then her hands near his neck, and a beat of careful maneuvering, and then, click.

The collar came away.

The difference was staggering. It was like a window thrown open in a sealed room, everything that had been pressed down and muffled and absent came rushing back in a single long exhale, and Ryan felt himself breathe, actually breathe, for what felt like the first time in hours. The Symbiote settled back into place like it had never left and the crushing weight that had sat across his shoulders all afternoon simply lifted and was gone.

"Haa... haa... thanks," he said.

He got his hands under him, pushed, and this time, he actually made it to sitting upright on the grass, legs folded, head up. Still wrecked, still feeling every single thing Marlon had put him through.

"You feel better already, don’t you?"

Summer was crouched in front of him, balanced on the balls of her feet, watching him with a small smile.

"Yeah." He glanced down at the collar where she’d set it on the grass beside him. Black, unassuming, sitting there like an ordinary object. "These Starakians... they really do have the right tools for everything, don’t they."

"Here." Summer reached into the bag she’d brought and held out a water bottle.

He took it without ceremony and drank, long and deep ones.

"I’m sorry about my father," Summer said while he drank, her voice going a little quieter. "He’s always like this when he trains people. He doesn’t know another way to do it."

Ryan lowered the bottle. "I can barely hold it together thinking about what he does to the others."

"He’s strict with everyone," Summer said, sighing. "But people accept it because, well, he knows what he’s doing. Former marine. He’s forgotten more about fighting than most people here will ever learn."

Ryan took another long drink, then set the bottle down on the grass between them.

"Don’t apologize for him," he said. "I agreed to the collar. I agreed to his methods. That was my call." He glanced at her. "Don’t carry that."

"I still think he overdid it," she said, looking at him steadily, her gaze moving across his face with a frankness she didn’t bother softening. "You looked half dead when I walked in. You still look half dead right now."

"He got me pretty good," Ryan said. The memory of Marlon’s knee connecting with his abdomen, twice, clean, no warning either time ,surfaced with unpleasant vividness. He pushed it aside. "I’ll live."

A silence settled between them, comfortable enough, filled by the distant sounds of the community winding down toward evening. The sky above the park had begun its slow shift, the deep gold of late afternoon bleeding into something softer and dimmer at the edges, the first suggestion of dusk beginning to gather on the horizon.

"Why are you doing this?" Summer asked.

Ryan looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"Shutting off the thing that makes you strong, on purpose, just to train." She asked hesitantly. "It doesn’t make sense to me. You’re already stronger with it. Why not just, accept that and use it?"

"It’s not enough," Ryan said.

Summer raised an eyebrow, waiting.

He didn’t answer right away. He looked up instead, out toward the horizon.

"I’m not strong enough to protect the people I care about," he said quietly. "That’s it. That’s the whole reason..."

Summer looked at him.

Her eyes moved to his face without her fully deciding to let them.

His eyes especially, she’d noticed them before.

A perfect, clear gray, the kind of color that shifted slightly depending on the light. Right now, catching the last of the afternoon and still bright from the exertion of the hours behind him, they had an almost luminous hue to them, like the color was lit from somewhere inside it. He was looking at the horizon with a thoughtful expression, and for a moment she just, looked.

They were definitely the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen in her life.

Then Ryan suddenly turned his head and his gaze found hers.

Summer looked away immediately, the heat arriving in her face before she’d fully registered that she’d been caught. She reached up and tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear.

The tips of her ears felt warm.

She said nothing feeling strangely embarrassed and nervous.