Resilience | ✔

Chapter Fifteen

The training room was enormous. It was less a room and more of a hangar—the ceiling had to be a good fifty feet above the floor, struck through with steel support beams. An obstacle course of sorts—more like a parkour course—took up half the room; the other half was a mixture of training mats and targets. Everyone was in it and occupied, save Tony and Pepper. Natasha and Sam were duking it out on a mat; Vision was pulling tight loops high in the air; Steve was in the middle of the parkour course, hurling his shield and having it bounce off various objects before it returned to him. He had on fingerless gloves; aside from that he was the only one close to wearing official Avengers gear. Everyone else was in exercise clothes. As Marley watched, Rhodey popped up from behind a block in the parkour course and fired his gun three times. Halfway across the course, chips of plywood flew as his bullets found their mark.

"I'll be up there," Wanda said, pointing at the rafters, and swept her arms down and launched into the air, that beautiful red almost-fire shooting from her hands. Marley watched, not bothering to hide her awe, as Wanda reached a rafter and swung onto it, then started leaping from beam to beam. Those kinds of heights must not have been a problem for her, with her telekinesis as a safety net.

"Marley!" Sam called from the mat, wrapping a leg around Natasha's throat. "What's up?"

"Not much," she called back.

Natasha started laughing, not looking worried that Sam was starting to strangle her with her leg. "Is that the best you can do?" she wheezed, and the next second had him in a very painful head-and-armlock combo. Marley stifled a giggle.

"Marley!" Steve hollered across the hangar. "Nice of you to join us!"

"Oh, shut up." She jogged over, pausing a few feet away to wait until he had his shield in his hand to approach. "Is that made out of the same magic as Thor's hammer or something? It's spitting in the face of the laws of physics."

Steve shrugged. "Howard told me it was vibranium."

"I was joking." She knew what the shield was made out of—who didn't? Vibranium was literally unbreakable and incredibly rare. She'd read something once that Steve's shield was the largest concentration of vibranium in the world.

"Well, smartass, get wrapped up. We're going toe to toe." He went to sling his shield onto his back, then seemed to remember he wasn't wearing the harness for it. "No shoes and ditch the hoodie." He tossed her a roll of wraps and pointed at a mat.

So Marley headed over, wrapping up her hands. She kicked off her shoes and shucked off her sweatshirt, then started stretching.

"No stretches!" Steve came jogging over, now without shield and gloves. "The training we'll be doing is in case you're caught in a situation you aren't prepared for. You won't be warmed up—you'll just have to do your best." He stepped onto the mat. "If I'm down for five seconds you've won; if you're down for three I've won."

"That doesn't seem fair," Marley objected.

"Neither is an attempted abduction," said Steve. "You'd undoubtedly be smaller than whoever's trying to hurt you." He beckoned her onto the mat. "Don't pull any punches. Seriously. I want energy and force. You're fighting for your life."

Nerves roiled in Marley's stomach, but she stepped onto the mat and joined him in the center. A split second later, he'd thrown a punch, and the fight was on. She swayed to the side, a forearm coming up to block his next punch. A step back. A roundhouse kick to his side. Drop out of the kick into a crouch; pop up inside his guard. As much force as she could behind her knee to his groin. A heelpalm to his nose as he doubled a little. She kicked behind his heel, grabbing his arm as he fell to twist him around, and dropped onto his back, twisting his arm up behind him and pressing her own arm into his neck to smush his face into the mat. He was never able to get out of this hold.