Chapter 21: Rehab
The soup became eggs. The eggs became protein shakes blended by Kord with grim, trollish pride. The shaky walks from bed to sofa became laps around the main room, then careful journeys to the forge in the corner.
Fred’s world narrowed to the raw metrics of recovery. He measured progress in teaspoons at first—holding a mug without his hands trembling, standing in the shower unaided, the simple, profound victory of a full night’s dreamless sleep. Trixie was his shadow, his archivist, his anchor. She didn’t smother him, but her presence was a constant, quiet calibration. He’d catch her watching him, not with pity, but with a strategist’s eye, noting the hitch in his breath after three laps, the slight delay in his left-handed reach for a tool.
“I’m not glass,” he grumbled one afternoon, leaning on the cool anvil after a set of laborious, lightweight hammer swings.
“No,” she agreed from her stool, not looking up from the scanner she was repairing. “Glass breaks clean. You’re more like… stressed carbide. Could shatter, could hold. I’m just tracking which way it’s going to go.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
His slugs were his true physiotherapy. Voltage would nestle against his neck, emitting a low, steady current that felt like a thousand tiny hands massaging knotted muscle. Zero would coil around a stiff joint, pulling the deep ache out with gentle, persistent chill. They lent him their vitality, and in return, he spent hours just… being with them. Relearning the individual hum of each protoform, the specific weight of Webs in his palm, the confident, solid heat of Scorch. It was communion. It was reassurance for them all that the bond hadn’t frayed.
The forge became his temple. The first day he lit it, the rumble of the flame seemed to vibrate in his hollow chest. He started with simple tasks. Annealing a twisted piece of scrap. Realigning a warped barrel. His hands, once capable of machining a slinger’s internals to a thousandth of an inch, felt stupid and thick. But the scent of hot metal and oil was a language he’d never forgotten. It grounded him more than any therapist ever could.
A week after waking, he stood shirtless before the floor-to-ceiling crystal viewport, watching the eternal amber glow of the fungal forest outside. He flexed his hands. The softness was gone, replaced by re-emerging definition. The deep weariness had lifted, replaced by a coiled, restless energy. The ghost in the machine had been evicted. The machine was coming back online.
He turned to the main area. Eli was polishing Burpy’s jar, Kord was elbow-deep in a mecha-beast’s motor, Pronto was waxing his mustache with theatrical care, and Trixie was cross-referencing maps on a hologram.
“Alright,” Fred said, his voice filling the space. “Enough babysitting.”
They all looked up.
“I feel good. I feel ready.” He walked to the center of the room, his stride confident, no trace of a wobble. He stopped, looking at each of them. “I need to know if I’m lying to myself. So. I challenge you. All of you. Four-on-one. Right here, right now.”
The silence was brief, then shattered.
“Absolutely not!” Trixie shot to her feet, the hologram winking out. “Fred, be serious. A month ago you were in a coma.”
“A week ago you couldn’t hold a spoon,” Kord rumbled, though a keen, competitive light sparked in his eyes.
Pronto paled, his mustache wax forgotten. “A duel? Against the magnificent Pronto and his formidable associates? The odds are mathematically grotesque! For you, I mean!”
Only Eli was quiet. He set Burpy’s jar down carefully and studied Fred. He saw the set of the jaw, the familiar fire in the eyes, but also a new, hard-edged desperation underneath it. This wasn’t just about testing reflexes. It was an exorcism.
“Where?” Eli asked simply.
“The training canyon. Lower level. Full terrain. No lethal shots, but everything else is live.”
“Eli!” Trixie protested.
“He needs to know, Trix,” Eli said, meeting Fred’s gaze. “And we need to know what he’s got left. If Blakk comes tomorrow, we can’t have doubts.”
Fred gave a single, sharp nod. Gratitude. Understanding.
Trixie stared at them both, then threw her hands up. “Fine. But if you get your mullet singed off, don’t come crying to me.” The worry in her eyes betrayed her sharp tone.
The training canyon was a massive, artificially maintained ravine beneath the hideout, filled with scalable rock faces, rusting vehicle husks, and pockets of different terrain from sandy silt to sticky mud. Neutralizer fields at the edges would catch any truly dangerous shot.
They stood at one end. Fred, alone, rolling his shoulders, loading his bandolier with deliberate care. Across fifty yards of dusty ground, the Shane Gang huddled. Eli, Trixie, Kord, Pronto. It was absurd. It was perfect.
“Rules are simple!” Kord boomed, acting as unofficial referee. “First team to pin the other wins! No disintegration, no permanent psychic damage!” He shot a look at Fred. “You sure about this, gearhead?”
Fred just slapped his blaster against his palm. The thwack was his answer.
“Begin!”
Chaos, but a coordinated chaos.
Fred didn’t move. He let them come. Let them make the first play.
Eli and Burpy led with tradition—a blazing Fireball shot straight down the center, a declaration of intent. At the same time, Trixie’s Tormato, Bluster, zipped low and left, an orange vortex seeking to disrupt Fred’s footing with a localized tornado. Kord, grinning, launched a Rammstone of his own in a high, crushing arc. Pronto, shrieking, fired his Flatulorhinkus wildly into the air.
Fred breathed in. The world slowed.
His left hand became a blur. Three shots in under a second.
Splash met Burpy’s fireball mid-air. The collision wasn’t an explosion, but a violent eruption of superheated steam that billowed out in a thick, concealing cloud. At the same moment, Grime streaked into the ground just ahead of Bluster’s path. The earth erupted in a line of jagged, foot-long spikes, forcing the Tormato to veer sharply away.
The high-arcing Rammstone was the real threat. Fred tracked it, calculated. He didn’t try to block it. He fired Zero.
The Frostcrawler velocimorphed, a streak of blue-white cold. He intercepted the Rammstone not with force, but with a precise, encapsulating shell of instant ice. The frozen projectile, its momentum killed, dropped like a stone and shattered harmlessly on the canyon floor.
The steam cloud still hung in the air. Fred was already moving, sprinting not away, but at an angle, using the cover. He could hear them calling to each other, repositioning.
Trixie’s voice, sharp: “He’s in the steam! Don’t bunch up!”
A shadow loomed through the vapor—Kord, charging, a living battering ram. Fred didn’t break stride. He fired Webs at the canyon wall to his right, creating a taut horizontal line. He leapt, his left hand hooking the web line, and swung himself in a wide, soaring arc over Kord’s head. As he passed overhead, he dropped a small, buzzing present.
Voltage hit the ground behind the charging troll and unleashed a focused EMP pulse. Not enough to hurt, but sufficient to fry the electronics in Kord’s gear pack. The troll skidded to a halt as his enhanced jump jets sputtered and died.
“Cheap shot!” Kord roared, but he was laughing.
Fred landed, rolled, came up behind a rusted ore-hauler. His heart was pounding, not from fatigue, but from a fierce, singing joy. This was the syntax his body understood.
He peeked out. Eli was flanking right, using rock cover. Trixie was scaling a higher ledge for a vantage point. Pronto was… hiding in a pipe.
Fred went for the brain first. He sent Thorn. The Vinedrill slammed into the ground between Eli and Trixie’s positions. Instantly, a dense, thorny thicket erupted, fifteen feet high, dividing the battlefield and swallowing Trixie’s line of sight.
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me!” she yelled from the other side of the sudden wall.
Eli, cut off, fired a rapid spread of small Lariat slugs, trying to pin Fred down. Fred ducked behind the hauler, the energy tethers sizzling against the metal. He could work with this. Isolate. Dispatch.
He shot Shrapnel in a high, almost lazy parabola. It landed on top of the ore-hauler. The Hop Rock detonated, not with shrapnel, but with a concussive kinetic wave that flipped the massive husk onto its side with an earth-shaking crash. Now he had a fortress.
He heard Eli moving fast, trying to get a new angle. Fred readied Hammer. Raw force meets raw force.
He never got the shot.
A searing, painful tingle shot up his left leg, locking his muscles. He gasped, staggering. A glancing shot from Joules, Eli’s Tazerling, having skirted the thorn wall low to the ground, had finally found its mark—a minor nerve shock, rendering his leg useless.
It was just a second of impediment. But a second was everything.
Eli Shane didn’t miss. Burpy, now a streaking velocimorph, blazed around the corner. Not a fireball. A fusion of speed and heat that became a spiraling, binding band of pure energy.
At the same moment, a net of sticky, strong webbing—from Kord’s Arachnet—flew from the other side, pinning his legs and arms. He was caught.
He stood there, immobilized, breathing hard. The dust settled.
Eli stepped into view, blaster lowered, a concerned frown on his face. Kord lumbered up, brushing dirt off his arms. Trixie climbed over the thorn wall, using a vine as a rope, and dropped down. Pronto peeked out from his pipe.
Fred stopped struggling. He let out a long, shuddering breath. Then, he smiled. A real, full, relieved smile.
“Took all four of you,” he said, his voice thick with something that wasn’t defeat.
Eli walked up and cut the webs. “You’re fast. Faster than before, I think. Your combos are… meaner.”
“He fought smart,” Trixie said, arriving, her analytical mask back. “Used the terrain, divided us. Took out Kord’s mobility first. Isolated Eli.” She looked at Fred, her gaze searching. “But you hesitated at the end. When you were pinned by Joules. For a half-second, it was like you… froze.”
Fred’s smile faded slightly. He looked down at his left hand, flexing it. The ghost of that corridor of rust had flickered in that moment of vulnerability. A whisper of helplessness. It had cost him.
“Yeah,” he admitted, the word rough. “Something to work on.”
Kord clapped a massive hand on his shoulder, almost knocking him over. “Something to work on? Gearhead, you just went twelve rounds with the champion of Slugterra and his terrifyingly smart friends. And you made us sweat.” He grinned. “You’re back.”
As they helped extract him from the webbing, Fred looked around at their faces—smeared with dirt, lit with adrenaline and relief. He’d lost the duel. But he’d found his footing. The machine was operational. The mind behind it… still had a few patches to run.
But the crew was intact. The rhythm was returning.
He caught Trixie’s eye and winked. She shook her head, a small, private smile touching her lips. The unspoken verdict hung in the damp cavern air: He was ready. They all were. The ceasefire was over. The real war was waiting.
They walked back up to the hideout, laughing and teasing. The dusty, cool air of the training canyon clung to their clothes, a familiar scent mixed with the ozone of spent slug energy.
Kord was replaying the moment his jump-jet failed, his voice booming. “A stealth Tazerling shot! From behind! That’s just disrespectful, gearhead.”
“It was tactical,” Fred countered, a genuine grin on his face. He couldn’t believe that he had been able to hold them off like he had.
Eli slung an arm around his neck, half in a headlock, half a hug. “You hear that, Kord? Tactical. Means he knew he couldn’t take you straight on.”
“I knew I couldn’t take any of you straight on,” Fred admitted easily as they shuffled into the main room’s warm light. “That was the whole point.” The statement hung there, simple and profound. He hadn’t just been testing his body. He’d been testing the strategy required to survive being outnumbered, outgunned. The frozen half-second when Joules hit him still itched in his mind, a glitch in the system, but the rest of the software was running sharp.
Trixie caught his eye as she pulled her hair from its practical ponytail.
“You’re different,” she said quietly, so only he could hear. It wasn't a question.
“Maybe,” he said.
He wasn’t just back. He was better. The realization settled in his gut, warm and solid. The downtime, the forced stillness, had done something. It had sanded down the frantic, raw edges of his desire to prove himself and left behind a colder, denser core of certainty. He knew his limits now, firsthand, and knew exactly how far past them he could be pushed.
Kord began to get some dinner together, the clatter of pans a domestic counterpoint to the afternoon’s violence. Eli and Pronto kicked back on the sofa, their argument already having shifted to whether Eli’s final binding shot was ‘classic’ or ‘predictable.’
Fred headed into the bathroom to have a shower. The weight of the duel, the good kind of weight, sat in the pleasant burn across his shoulders and thighs. If he was going to be better, he had to look the part. The thought wasn’t vanity, but ceremony. No more oil-stained clothes from a forge he’d been too weak to use. No more rough hands softened by a month of bed rest. No more stubble that spoke of long nights he couldn’t even remember.
He turned the shower on as hot as he could get it without burning himself and stepped in. The first blast against his skin was almost painful, then melted into pure bliss. He braced his hands against the smooth cave-stone wall, letting the steam fill the space. The hot water pulled the aches and pains from his bones, unraveled the knotted cords in his muscles left from the fight and the long atrophy before it.
He faced the wall, head bowed, letting the water soak his blackened mullet, washing out the dried sweat and the fine, stubborn grit of the canyon. The roaring downpour drowned out everything else, creating a white-noise cocoon. So he felt, more than heard, the door open and close. The quiet click of the latch. The shuffle of soft soles on tile.
The shower curtain rings hissed along the rod. A cool draft kissed his back, then was gone.
He felt Trixie’s presence behind him a second before he felt her hands. Her palms, smooth from gels and scanner work, settled on the hard plane of his stomach. Her touch was deliberate, testing, as if mapping the returned terrain of him. She pulled herself into him, the length of her body slotting against his back, her cheek resting between his shoulder blades. Her skin was cool from the room’s air, a shocking contrast to the scalding water.
Fred turned around slowly, the water cascading over both of them now. He held her close, his hands finding the familiar dip of her spine. They were both completely naked, but neither minded. It was beyond that. Her red hair was plastered dark to her head and shoulders, her freckles stark against skin flushed pink from the heat. She looked utterly real, stripped of all her strategic layers.
She tilted her face up, water droplets clinging to her eyelashes. Fred leaned in, placing his lips against hers in a tender, loving kiss. It was slow, and deep, and quiet beneath the drumming shower. One of his hands cradled the back of her head, his fingers tangling in wet hair. The other rested just above the curve of her ass, holding her steady against him.
They stayed like that for a long time, not moving, just sharing breath and warmth and the simple, massive fact of being together, whole, and alive. The water beat down on them, a private storm.
It was only when the spray began to lose its heat, spluttering into luke-warmness, that they finally parted. The shower finally went cold, a sharp, abrupt change that made Trixie gasp and Fred laugh, a short, startled sound. They both stepped out, dripping and steaming, into the humid bathroom air.
He handed her a towel, watching as she burrowed into the fabric. They dried off with a quiet efficiency, the earlier intensity softened into a comfortable silence. She pulled on clean leggings and a soft gray sweater from her bunk. Fred dressed in dark jeans and a fresh black henley, the fabric feeling strangely light against his scrubbed skin.
Trixie watched Fred shave, leaning against the doorway. He scraped the month’s identity, the ghost’s disguise, from his jaw in careful, steady strokes. The rasp of the blade was the only sound. When he was done, rinsing his face with cold water, he looked up into the mirror. The face looking back was his, truly his, for the first time since the dark water.
He met Trixie’s reflected gaze and nodded once.
Then they both walked out into the main area. The smell of Kord’s cooking—something hearty with roasted mushrooms and cave-root—filled the space. Eli and Pronto were now debating something on a scanner screen.
“You look… clean,” Kord noted, without turning from the stove.
“Feel it,” Fred said, sinking into a chair at the table.
Eli looked over, his eyes narrowing slightly in appraisal. He didn’t say anything about the change. He just said, “Burpy’s still miffed about that steam cloud. Says it was a cheap trick.”
“It was a cheap trick,” Fred agreed, a smile touching his lips.
Pronto sniffed the air. “The culinary genius of Kord Zane is a far more worthy topic! I, for one, have forgiven the earlier attempts at my immobilization.”
They were all here. Whole. Functioning. For this single, quiet moment in the glow of the hideout, nestled in their mushroom-top pod above the glowing forest, the war outside felt distant.
Trixie settled into the chair next to Fred, her knee bumping against his under the table. Her hand found his and squeezed, just once. A signal.
We’re ready.
And somewhere, in the deep, twisting dark of the 99 caverns, something that was once a man felt the echo of a disrupted mindscape finally, completely, seal shut. A tool had broken in his hand. He would need to forge a sharper one.