The Unfortunates | COMPLETED

Part 78

The evening was disastrous.

It seemed like every fighter Avery had trained had stage-fright for a while, and some of them had even refused to fight the next day.

Avery had ordered a tonne of pizza and ice cream to calm them down, even though the Generals didn't exactly approve of her methods, one of them going as far as to call it a 'bribe'.

Sure enough, after they all had some carbs, they calmed down, and Avery had gotten them to talk about why they were afraid of fighting the following day.

Some were afraid of disappointing their parents, and for those kids, Avery organised phone calls home to the families, with the parents under strict instructions to only be encouraging about the event taking place.

Some were terrified they'd just do terribly, and Avery told them there was no shame in not winning. Her words did nothing to help, so Avery enlisted the help of some of the counsellors who were supplied by the Council, who organised the Trials with the help of some of the Senior Alphas.

The elder kids were a little sad and a little nervous.

Some of them needed to place in the top fifty in their category for courses or placements in training courses that they wanted to do.

Some of them were sad that this was technically their last pack sanctioned event as kids, because after their final Trial, they were considered to be fully functioning members of adult society.

Avery sympathised with the older ones and told them about the Trial she won.

It had been a surprise to everybody there when she had won because she had been the definite underdog.

Teenage Avery was all legs and arms, without much muscle definition anywhere really.

Everyone had expected the gangly teen to be knocked out in the first few rounds.

When she made it to the girls' semi-finals with twenty others, they had put it down to her Alphas blood heritage.

When she had won all of the female matches, she had been pitted again a male twice her width.

Miraculously, to her father's utter shock, she had beaten him in all of the rounds bar the first one.

The stadium had been completely silent when she had won, as opposed to the usual cheers and screaming.

Everyone had been so surprised she made it so far and then actually won that nobody knew how to react.

When the umpire had raised her arm, the stadium had stayed in complete silence for a minute.

Avery didn't blame anybody for the disbelief, she had watched the videos of her fights afterwards, and even she had no idea how she managed to beat half of her opponents.

What she did remember, however, was the University interview she had to attend the next day, covered in bruises and cuts from all of her fights, and how the interviewer was horrified until he saw that she was proficient in martial arts from her questionnaire.

That embarrassment had been hard to push down, and she still cringes sometimes at the memory of the interviewer's horrified face.

The fact that their terrifying Alpha had been the underdog before had given some of the teenagers some of their confidence back. Still, some were inconsolable and just needed to be left alone for a while to mope before they could be spoken to or motivated.

Avery left the children to their own devices, making some of them promise to call her if there were any issues with anything at all.

She was a very hands-on Alpha, and her pack certainly appreciated.