“So what’s going on?” Mindy asked, her voice a mix of genuine concern and the kind of nosy curiosity you develop when your roommate has a habit of falling off buildings. “I checked on you, and you were completely lights-out. I was really worried, but the Doctor said you were suffering probably a minor concussion and energy exhaustion.”
I nodded, smiling as I grabbed a slice of pizza that cost more than my entire sense of self-worth. It was cutting into my limited funds—a budget tighter than a spandex costume on a growth-spurted hero—but it was really worth it to get actual, edible food near the sub-floor dormitory lounge instead of the nutrient paste the academy claimed was ‘optimized for metabolic variance.’ “Yep, remember how I was trying to expand my energy? I think I succeeded. Not a whole lot, but enough to make a serious difference.”
I left out the part where my new trick felt like developing a supernatural allergy to my own potential. My Alpha-dar was buzzing at a low, constant hum, a psychic mosquito whine in the back of my skull that was equal parts terrifying and strategically invaluable.
My energy budget had more than doubled. Falling off a roof sucked—a sentiment I felt in my still-aching bones—but I guess technically it was worth it. Apparently, I’d also gotten a bit tougher, my skin now approximating ‘premium budget leather’ instead of ‘wet tissue paper,’ and breathing in that delicious, chaotic spirit energy had gotten a bit easier and a lot faster.
Five hundred and fifty energy points. A king's ransom. I still couldn’t hold a candle to even most class twos, energy-wise, but with the right preparation, I’d made it my job to hold my own against people who could bench-press buses. My career was built on the art of the underdog, the science of the cheap shot.
Also, once I got in a minor reset, which only cost me fifty points! I felt great. It was like finally getting a software update for my own personal dumpster fire of a existence. I wasn’t going to try it on anything major, but I kinda needed to test… and at that level, testing it was sort of amazing.
The problem was, a lot of the things I wanted to try out—like seeing if my dissolved form could now outrun my crippling emotional baggage—I really did NOT want to be under the all-seeing eye of BSA, or even the tentative, weary trust of senpai Bob. They knew what powers I displayed when I was working the SSS angle, and what I had shown them, but there was a lot of stuff I needed to experiment with that I never wanted to see the light of day.
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“So what does that mean?” Mindy pressed, pulling me from my thoughts of illicit power testing.
“That means that I might be able to make a bigger impact before I pass out and require a food truck to be inverted into my stomach. I still can’t recover my entire pool in a single day, but I am a lot closer to that now, and for that reason alone I owe you big.” The debt was mounting. First, she gets me into this viper pit of a school, now she’s indirectly responsible for my new and exciting ways to potentially explode. My life was a never-ending tab I couldn’t hope to pay.
She shrugged, a gesture that said ‘we’re even’ while her eyes said ‘you’re an idiot.’ “If you can use it for healing, I doubt very much you will owe me anything. So you figured out how to expand your energy? How does that work? And how will it affect our teamwork?” She said ‘teamwork’ like it was a foreign concept she was trying out for size, which, given my lone-wolf tendencies and her ice-queen persona, was probably accurate.
I thought about that for a moment, choosing my words with the care of a bomb disposal expert who’s had a few too many coffees. “Well, I might be able to improve your armor more easily, make it less ‘fashionable cryo-suit’ and more ‘actually might stop a bullet.’ As far as healing, I have no idea, I haven’t really had a chance to test it yet, but from what I can tell, it has improved slightly, so my range might also have improved, but I’m not willing to hurt anyone to test it.” My ethical line was drawn somewhere between ‘rent-a-villain’ and ‘amateur vivisectionist.’
She looked at me thoughtfully, a familiar, exasperated spark in her eyes. “The more I get to know you, the more I realize that you are both brilliant and blind.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, preparing to be insulted. It was my natural state.
She sighed, the sound like a glacier calving a small chunk of patience. “You come up with ideas and uses for your abilities that are amazing. You get these strokes of brilliance and dive right into them with almost no fear. And then you completely miss the most obvious stuff right in front of your face. I don’t get it.” It was the story of my life. I could see the infinite potential in a grain of sand but would trip over the entire beach to get to it.
“What did I miss that was so obvious?” I braced for impact.
She sighed deeply, as if explaining basic arithmetic to a particularly dimwitted kaiju. “The clinic? It’s nearly the end of the semester. In a day or two, higher-year students are going to start frantically scrambling to improve their rankings. That means injuries, and lots of chances to test your limits with healing.”
I nodded, the penny dropping with the force of a meteorite. “Oh.” Yet another case of me overcomplicating a simple solution. In retrospect, I probably was a complete moron, since just knowing a small part of my abilities already clued in other people about ways to use them that I had never even thought about. My ex, Crystal, had been the same. Always seeing the angle, the profit, the power, while I was just trying to keep the lights on and my molecules in the correct order.
