Code Black (on hiatus)

Twenty-seven

Chapter 27: Distrust and Doubts

Years before the special sub-unit of Eres officially began, the first recruits including me, Kris, and Suho have undergone series of training and practice. It involves months of simultaneous physical drills, socialization polishing, and mental cultivation.

Saying it's hard is an understatement—it was rather hellish. One time, we were forced under an unfathomable diet that includes a lot of food that I have only eaten on my nightmares. I doubt all of it are edible, but we did not dare disobeying otherwise.

Stamina is crucial, but our ability to make snappy decision to crawl out of a potential harm is way more necessary. That snappy decision is developed by assessing risk and probable hazards. However, the only way to improve this kind of skill drastically is to clean out the possible dissonance that makes us hesitate on choices in the first place.

Those hesitations are inevitably there because of fears. The pressure from it would affect rationality once it climbed up our heads. Assessment of dangers would be greatly affected by internal conflicts such as terrors. So, I would say that the scariest part of the training would be getting rid of the common frights that we may face ahead once we're out in missions.

One of our training in fear-managements involves us going through series of common "phobias". Fear of fire, spiders, drowning, and darkness. We were particularly trained more with heights and water, since being with Kris involves falling and being with Suho involves drowning.

Heights. I was particularly afraid of heights. When a ship sinks, I knew I can still survive by swimming. But when an airplane fails, I clearly won't be able to fly. Seeing how high I may fall made my knees wobble and my gut gargle inside.

The first stage of that fear-management training was us jumping off a cliff of about 200 feet. Kris aced it, naturally. Suho had few hesitations but managed to shove it aside easily. I was the failing student in that class, because it took me a good ten minutes of praying before jumping when it only took Suho and Kris less than ten seconds to plunge into their "demise".

The fact that safety equipment was wrapped around our bodies and we're not literally trying to die did not help me ease my shuddering insides at all. And after those good ten minutes that felt like the last moments of my life, I had no choice but to obey or I'd be doing this again alone.

The next stages were rather horrible, but you may already guess who made me overcome my fear of heights. The boy that laughs at gravity himself. He let me tag along his flights and I was okay with it until the last stage of that training.

The last stage could have been traumatizing, but Kris helped me a lot to deal with it internally. Suho and I were instructed to jump off a aircraft, soaring thousands of feet above the clouds. But here's a delightful twist... there were no parachutes. Kris should be able to catch us mid-air in a calculated altitude. The instructors called it a trust fall... but I secretly considered it homicide. We jumped, and for a few second, my life flashed before my eyes

But I have never seen Kris in actual action back then, and I underestimated his speed and accuracy. That is when I knew that he may or may not have the ability to travel around the globe at the speed of sound, in 24, 696 kilometers per hour. Peter Pan should be threatened.