My new class schedule was a thing of bureaucratic beauty, a masterpiece of structured tedium designed to mold me into a productive, compliant cog in the superhero industrial complex. The most interesting part of my day, however, wasn't on the syllabus. It was a very peculiar message from the BSA testing facility that had pinged my secure inbox. An audit result. Apparently, my power class wasn't a neat little number but a sliding scale of bureaucratic indecision: Four to Six.
Seven classes. Because why commit to a single, easily quantifiable measure of my potential for mayhem when you can have a spectrum? I understood the why, of course, especially after I’d blitzed through the placement exams for Materials Logistics, Business Logistics, and Business Management. It turns out that nearly getting your company stolen out from under you by a glass-hearted succubus gives you a very practical, if painful, education in how not to run a business.
In a traditional university, those courses are front-loaded with fluff to justify their exorbitant cost, the entire institution functioning as a glorified printing press for expensive, official-looking paper that mostly certifies your ability to endure soul-crushing boredom and kiss the appropriate amount of ass. Don’t get me wrong, logistical mathematics can be tricky at first glance, but stacked against quantum field equations, orbital mechanics, or the eldritch actuarial calculations insurance companies use to avoid paying claims, it’s child’s play.
I’m acutely aware that being a savant in one area just makes you a spectacular idiot in others. Those intellectual bobbleheads who think a high IQ entitles them to rule the world are morons; intelligence isn't a single monolithic thing. Sure, my power is a natural cheat code for particle physics and material science, but as I learned the hard way with Doyle Routing, specialization just means you’re exquisitely competent at driving your one-trick-pony straight off a cliff. I’d started SSS as a test of my broader capabilities, and it was probably a test I’d failed. The company survived, but Abigail was right—if I’d kept trying to captain Doyle Routing, I’d have steered it into the seabed of bankruptcy. I could have kept the trucks running, right up until the repo men showed up because I’d forgotten to pay the taxes on the parking lot.
The hardest part of any enterprise is the people. The squishy, irrational, emotionally-driven meat-sacks you have to manage, motivate, and prevent from embezzling. I’d forced myself to learn the other junk—accounting, tax law, management theory—but running a real business is a thousand tiny fires that require other people with other skills to put out. And the most important skill of all is judging who actually has those skills and who just has a well-padded resume and a convincing smile.
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So, after testing out of the laughably simple parts of a Logistics degree, I’d holed up in my room, trying to focus on the soft skills I so clearly lacked. My small, disposable desk was covered in syllabus sheets. Preparation is ninety-nine percent of not dying, and I was trying to get a head start on the semester starting tomorrow.
Of course, Kellar Academy had its own starkly pragmatic idea of what I should be learning over the next four years. Their mission statement wasn’t “get a good job”; it was “prevent the extinction of the human race.” A subtle difference. The actual classes were just the scheduled torture sessions; every student was expected to spend the majority of their so-called ‘free’ time training, cultivating, or otherwise preparing for a career that had a statistically significant chance of ending in a closed-casket funeral.
My only two official, college-style courses were Advanced Anatomy and Game Theory I, both of which applied as much to Alpha logistics and combat triage as they did to civilian life. Sandwiched between those were the Academy’s special blend of cheerful optimism: Basic Teamwork (Remedial Edition), Combat Logistics, Kaiju Tactics (because why not), Power Exploitation (Transformative), and, because Bob had clearly flexed his gravitational influence, Tai Chi for my physical education credit.
I was a little bothered. I knew some Krav Maga—enough to make a mugger regret his life choices—but wouldn’t an advanced combat art be more useful than slow-motion lawn care? I was still iffy on the whole metaphysical angle. Yeah, it might help my cultivation, or it might be a colossal waste of time better spent learning to dodge. Still, it couldn’t be all bad; millions of people practiced it every day without spontaneously achieving enlightenment or tearing a hole in reality. Then again, millions of people also thought reality TV was a worthwhile way to spend an evening, so the wisdom of the masses was a suspect concept at best. I guess I was going to find out.
The typical college course contains about as much total information as a moderately detailed wiki article, stretched over a semester with a generous helping of busywork, pop quizzes, and memorizing the birthdates of dead mathematicians. Kellar didn’t play that game. This was an educational boot camp. Advanced Anatomy wasn’t just labeling a diagram; it was a deep, terrifying dive into every part of the human body, how it worked, how to put it back together when it broke, and how its failure modes differed depending on whether it was encased in skin or mild steel. It was all about practical application. I guess that’s the difference between a school and an academy dedicated to making sure its graduates don’t accidentally rip their own arms off.
What class from Kellar's brutal curriculum would you be most excited to take, and which one would you dread? Kaiju Tactics sounds fascinating until you remember there's probably a practical exam...
