The Arena was set up in a way that was either brilliantly realistic or a sadistic parody of urban decay. A tight grid of faux-city streets, like a scaled-down model of Old New York before it decided to become a comic book, littered with heavy, broken detritus. The floor itself was a marvel of engineering, a massive grid of ultra-durable plates that could be raised and lowered like one of those novelty pin-art toys. The holoprojectors overhead painted a surprisingly convincing picture of crumbling buildings and dark alleyways, a stage set for disaster.

  The ‘enemies’ were a roaming pack of drones, controlled by some Widgeteer named Heathcliff. They were cheap-looking things, vaguely catlike constructs of wood and wrought iron, but each of the two dozen was roughly human-sized, strong, and annoyingly durable.

  The mission was simple, which meant it was destined for catastrophic failure. There were dummies stashed around the arena, simulating unconscious victims of a ‘wall-break’—cape-speak for a villain attack. The teams were split. The combat Alphas had to fight off the drones, while the civilian-track students, playing rescue workers, tried to extract the dummies.

  The normies weren’t terrible. Some even had real rescue experience, moving with a focused efficiency that was downright admirable.

  The Alphas, however, were in remedial teamwork for a reason. The class was a dumping ground for the defensive, the stubborn, and the terminally solo. It showed. It was like watching a group of cats try to herd themselves.

  “So teamwork credits are required to graduate?” I asked Mister Dexter, our observer for the evening, as we watched the carnage unfold on the monitor bank.

  He shook his head. “Not to graduate. This is a school, after all. But to progress with certain hero certifications, teamwork has to be completed. It’s a filter.”

  I watched as one of the second team’s primaries, a girl with some kind of metal telekinesis, broke off from her group to chase a drone that had feinted an attack. A classic solo move. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except she completely ignored the ‘rescue workers’ trying to wrestle a dummy out from under a propped-up, burnt-out car. I saw the vehicle shift, its balance precarious. With a sigh that cost me another fraction of my soul, I pushed energy out and got a kinetic air screen up just in time to keep the several-ton wreck from crushing the normies. That was the fourth time I’d had to intercede. My energy reserves were bleeding out faster than my will to live.

  Mister Dexter looked at me, his expression unreadable. “You know I saw that, right? Care to tell me how you did it? No one else was paying attention, not even Catling, who was right underneath.”

  I nodded, wiping metaphorical sweat from my brow. “I figured you did. I never said I had poor control, just a pathetic capacity.”

  He nodded. “So you… telekinetically held the debris up long enough for them to get the dummy out?”

  I shrugged. “Close. Are you an Alpha?”

  “No. But I worked with, around, and against them for fifteen years. You learn to recognize the signs.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah. It wasn’t telekinesis, though the difference is academic. Telekinetics move things. I stripped the kinetic energy from the thin layer of moisture and air clinging to one side of the wreck. Killed its momentum.”

  “I fail to see the difference in practice.”

  “The difference,” I said, feeling the familiar energy debt headache begin to bloom behind my eyes, “is that telekinetics impose motion. I just… cancel the check. And it costs me. Just playing guardian angel for this circus has burned through a week’s worth of cultivation. Will this test be over soon? I’d like to collapse in private.”

  He looked at me oddly. “Do you want it to be?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation. “Call me a jerk, but I’m not as forgiving as you.” I started pointing at the screens. “Right now, I’d flunk almost all of them. The girl in red is just excited to have something to hit. That one is so in love with her own power she’s a walking friendly-fire incident. Chinook is mentally AFK. That one, the brick-looking girl? She needs serious retraining. I don’t know if it’s her power making her too slow or her attitude making her too stupid, but she shouldn’t be in a team if she spends all her time in a form that turns her into a walking demolition derby. Catling and those two guys and the girl with the arc welder power shouldn’t be here either, but that’s because they’re actually trying to work together.”

  He nodded, a flicker of respect in his eyes. “Most of the skilled ones you pointed out are in remedial for… administrative reasons. Good eye.”

  I chuckled. “I’ve had bad tactics beaten into me by experience. The weak man never learns because he never risks failure. The wise man learns from his own mistakes. The smart man learns from the mistakes of others. I try to be the latter, but I keep failing, so I guess that makes me the former.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He nodded. “I can’t really flunk any of them unless they fail the written exam, which is absurdly easy. Once they’re in regular teamwork, they can be shipped back here. Some might just ditch and join the Monster Hunter scouts, avoid teamwork altogether. It limits their future, but repeatedly failing is a wake-up call that some people just aren’t cut out for the community.”

  “Hold that thought,” I said, as on the screen, Brickhouse Girl—my name for her—smashed a drone into a pile of debris. The impact kicked up a razor-sharp chunk of rusty car hood that scythed toward a girl using a blowtorch power. Time for the main event.

  My earlier method of ‘teleportation’ had been a brutal, energy-intensive nightmare. It involved disassembling myself into free molecules, moving that cloud to a new location, and reassembling myself based on a saved blueprint. It was slow, agonizing, and couldn’t pass through solid matter. A solid wall, or even deep water, would stop me cold. It was less teleportation and more controlled, suicidal disassembly.

  My new version was… better. Now that I had a little ‘give’ in my soul-energy, I could steal the energy from the molecular breakdown and store it for reassembly. I could also choose to leave a trail of kinetically-aggressive ions behind me as I moved. It still wasn’t perfect—I was still a cloud of sad molecules—but I was a faster, more efficient cloud. The best part was the ion trail; it disturbed the air, pulled in dust, and made my path obvious. It was a perfect special effect to sell the lie that this was just a fancy super-speed dash, not a horrifying violation of my own physical form.

  I’d clocked the speed at around seventy miles an hour. The range was limited by how long I could push my free-floating molecules, but as long I had ten percent of my energy left, I could reform. If I couldn’t… well, I’d be dead, which was a fantastic motivator to be careful. I’d decided to call it my ‘Ghost Dash’. It sounded cool and misleading. Branding is important.

  ***

  Yeah, now I was suddenly in the battlefield. The blowtorch girl—Kelly, as she’d soon gasp—had a nasty, bleeding gash in her right leg where the shrapnel had torn through her cheap school costume.

  “Who? What?” asked a guy with a magnificent mustache—a baseline human who had already slapped a tourniquet on her leg with practiced efficiency.

  “I’m Blueprint, auditing the class. Hold her still. Miss?” I said, my voice dropping into what I hoped was a calm, professional tone. It probably just sounded tired.

  “Kelly!” she gasped. “I’m Kelly!”

  “Right, Kelly. I’m going to fix your leg. It’s going to feel weird. You, Mustache, good job. You probably saved her life.” The tourniquet was tight, the wound was deep, and there was a lot of blood on the ground. Artery. Fantastic. I couldn’t just heal the leg and watch her die of hypovolemic shock.

  The cut was clean, thankfully. The artery was my first target. I started reconnecting the delicate tissues, a microscopic plumber fixing a burst pipe. Thank whatever gods were listening the bone wasn’t broken; marrow is a fiddly, energy-sucking nightmare to put back together.

  “Mustache Guy?”

  “Dave.”

  “Hey Dave. I need you to start loosening that tourniquet. I’ve got the artery, but I need you to keep your fingers on her pulse. Tell me if it gets thready or stops.” I looked over at Brickhouse Girl, who looked like she was about to cry. “Hey, you. Klutz. Can you please exit your ‘walking disaster area’ form? I need someone to sponge out the wound as I close it. It’s full of dirt and rust and regret.”

  She nodded, and the hulking stone form shimmered away into a cute, petite Japanese girl in a holo-mask. Dave nodded toward the medkit, and the girl—who looked like she should be selling anime merch, not causing compound fractures—grabbed a handful of gauze.

  I started pulling the fabric back from the now slowly-seeping wound. Dave slowly released the pressure on the tourniquet, his eyes on the pulse in her neck. He’d also given her a tranquilizer, so she was blissfully unaware of the horror-movie scene of her muscles and veins knitting themselves back together under my hands. I was doing it slowly for two reasons: one, so the closed-circuit cameras could see it was me doing actual healing and not just waving my hands, and two, to make the brickhouse fangirl feel both guilty and useful. You can’t cure stupid, but you can sometimes shame it into being more careful.

  “Start sponging,” I told the anime extra. “Right into the wound. Dave’s got her doped up; she’s in happy land. Dave? Pulse?”

  He nodded. “Pulse is a little thready, but she’s stable. Maybe down three quarts. EMS can top her off with plasma.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t bother.” I was already blueprinting her red blood cells and pushing whole, fresh blood into her system, synthesizing it from my own protein reserves. The cost was astronomical, but the show must go on. “Keep sponging, Akyo.”

  She glanced at me in surprise. “How do you know my real name? I am Terracotta.”

  I quirked an eyebrow at her. “I didn’t. I don’t know your name. Akyo was Dire Badger’s girlfriend. It was the only Japanese girl’s name I could remember. Would you rather I called you ‘Killer’?”

  She shook her head rapidly and returned to her pointless sponging. The wound was already sealed. She’d have a vivid scar for a while, a souvenir of her carelessness. The sponging was never necessary—I could nudge contaminants out on a molecular level—but the lesson was more important than efficiency. Someday I might be in a real fight with ‘Terracotta’, and I’d prefer not to be killed by her collateral damage.

  Dave shook his head at me. “Man, you got that mixed up. Great job, by the way. Cleanest field heal I’ve ever seen.”

  I lifted my hands, now covered in useless, contaminated blood. “Hey, Dave. When I’m concentrating, I just name people in my head. What’d I get wrong? It’s not her blood type, I promise.”

  “Good strong pulse,” Dave confirmed. “No, Akyo wasn’t Dire Badger’s girlfriend; that was Yukiko. Akyo was the name of the ninja assassin sent after him later.”

  “Huh. Seriously?” I was riffing now, building the persona of a guy who knew just enough comic lore to be wrong. “I thought Akyo was the one he was getting gooey with who got turned into the herald of Arcanus and joined those mystic slaughter guys.”

  Dave shook his head, a true fan exasperated by a casual. “No, that was Kamiko. Madame Deathstrife.”

  I facepalmed, suddenly remembering my hands were covered in blood. Crap. Now my mask was a mess. Well, at least it matched the rest of my costume. If this cultivation thing was real, at least I wasn’t stuck in an authentic Xianxia drama. All those identical-sounding names would have driven me truly insane.