Bob, or as I’d mentally downgraded him to, ‘Senpai Not-Entirely-Insane,’ had been right. Tai Chi was an eye-opener. Who knew that the secret to not blowing myself up with cosmic power was to move like a sleepy old man swatting at imaginary bees?

  While a lot of the traditional energy-flow mumbo jumbo was about as scientifically valid as a homeopathy seminar, the core philosophy—the whole ‘don’t fight the river, just redirect the flow’ thing—was shockingly useful. As a form of meditation, it was vastly superior to the hard martial arts and straight-up masochistic exercises I’d been using before. My previous routine was basically just screaming at my own soul until it threw me a metaphysical bone. This was… quieter. More insidious.

  Which was why I was now practicing my Tai Chi in a condemned, radioactive sewer. Because my life is a series of increasingly bizarre choices that would make a sane man weep.

  It was only two weeks into the new semester. I still hadn’t gotten access to the good radioactive materials—the kind that glows with a friendly, inviting green hue instead of a skin-melting, cancer-inducing gamma burst. My formal request for materials from the Academy’s regular vault had been enthusiastically approved by my new Power Exploitation (Transformation) teacher.

  GrimFang!

  No, I wasn’t trying to emphasize his name with unhinged mental exuberance. His superhero identity really was GrimFang! Complete with the exclamation point, like a low-budget metal band or a particularly aggressive brand of breakfast cereal. His form was perma-shifted, a common occupational hazard for certain types of Alphas where your power decides your body is merely a suggestion. His physiology was a permanent stigma of his awakening.

  Supposedly, down in Bolivia, there was an entire community of people with jaguar-like stigmata that actually bred true. Because of the single-chromosome nature of the powers, their kids popped out with built-in claws and a purr, leading to a much higher male Alpha survival rate. A fascinating evolutionary sidestep. GrimFang!, however, jokingly referred to himself as ‘Florida Man.’ Because of course he did.

  The story, as he’d gleefully told it on the first day of class, involved two cases of cheap beer, a girl with questionable taste in men, and a U-Haul pickup truck bed filled with over a dozen overcrowded and profoundly pissed-off alligators. The details were hazy, but the results were standing in front of me: over seven feet of corded muscle, dotted with green and yellow scales, and topped off with a thick, powerful tail he used to absently thump against the lecture podium. His face was mostly human, if you ignored the reptilian eyes, the hint of a muzzle, and the smile that looked like someone had dropped a bag of steak knives.

  On command, he could shift into an even larger battle form—a dinosaurian nightmare that could bench-press a sedan—or a gigantic, class-four-armor-plated alligator for those pesky aquatic assaults. Apparently, looking like a rejected Street Shark character didn’t hamper his love life. I regularly saw him with a rotating roster of two or three extremely attractive Alpha women hanging off each scaled limb. His teaching style was simple: every power is different, so stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and instead figure out how to turn the peg into a wrecking ball.

  His advice was interesting, if not immediately useful, for a guy whose idea of a “transformation” was changing the molecular structure of his underwear to be more breathable. He focused on physical shifts—getting bigger, stronger, growing wings. For me, the concept was more abstract. A ‘battle blueprint’—a short-term, energy-intensive reset that could hyper-specialize my abilities at the expense of others—was a thrilling idea. It was also a pipe dream that would have to wait until my energy pool was less of a puddle and more of a… slightly larger puddle.

  Unlike most Alphas, I couldn’t just pull matter from the ether or return it when the party was over. The idea of a battle form that required me to pre-eat an entire cow and then later, uh, dispose of the excess biomass sounded less like a superpower and more like a particularly grotesque digestive disorder. Still, it cemented a few ideas for improving my energy efficiency. Every little bit helps when you’re running on cosmic fumes.

  I’d even had a few social nibbles of my own. Both Power Exploitation and Basic Teamwork were ‘costume’ classes, which meant everyone was dressed in their spandex-and-ego best. There was one woman in Teamwork named Talisman, an exquisite dark-eyed number with hair as black as a tax auditor’s soul, who made it very clear she was interested in seeing me without my costume. Or my underpants.

  The mask, she assured me, was optional. Her ability was creating tiny statues that granted temporary physical boosts. After the third time, I politely begged off, citing a pressing engagement with a nap, she informed me—with a wink that promised unimaginable delights—that she could create talismans that improved virility to “superhuman levels.”

  My paranoia, that faithful old hound, barked a warning. I was interested in the same way a moth is interested in a bug zapper—it’s a beautiful, alluring light, right up until the moment you become a brief, sizzling footnote. Getting added to someone’s personal harem sounded like a fantastic way to end up as an enchanted battery for her love potions.

  Besides, I was sort of starting to… tolerate Candace. We’d started working out together in the mornings. It was less ‘sweating to the oldies’ and more ‘mutually assured destruction through calisthenics,’ but it was something. I wasn’t going to ask her out, though. That would require a level of emotional availability I’d sold for scrap metal years ago.

  I’d even come clean to Mindy about being the supervillain she’d fought back in our staged battle. Her reaction was surprisingly pragmatic. “Operational security,” she’d said with a shrug. “You didn’t know me. Considering what you were doing for a living, I can’t blame you a bit.” Although on some level, I think she still blamed me for her being the last to know. I’d become a recurring footnote in her life: “The time I was duped by that scrawny rent-a-villain.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  So, with the materials for the team’s armor secured (a process that involved more bureaucratic paperwork than actually building the damn things), I’d started fabrication. And to power that fabrication, I was doing Tai Chi in the tunnel.

  The VERY long, very dark, very toxic tunnel. The radiation and chemical-hardened chamber under the bay itself, a place that made the rest of the reclaimed dump island seem like a five-star resort. It was an old dumping ground underneath another dumping ground. The poetry of it was almost beautiful in its nihilism.

  Yes, I’d gotten a decontamination chamber. A portable, full-steam setup that made me feel like a baked potato being prepped for a dystopian dinner party. The water was reclaimed and placed into hazardous storage until I could figure out how to dispose of it without creating a new generation of radioactive frogs.

  It turned out the vapor and pressure outlet that was supposed to keep the tunnel itself somewhat breathable had corroded into a useless piece of junk. The Academy had just installed a new lock at the head of the tunnel and called it a day. Once I’d proved that my body treated radiation like an all-you-can-eat buffet (with the ensuing metabolic debt being the violent food poisoning), I’d been allowed to install my potato-baker at the lock and use the tunnel for ‘power training.’ Apparently, a student willingly marinating himself in carcinogens wasn’t even in the top ten of the strangest things the faculty had dealt with this month.

  I couldn’t go all the way down yet. Hell, with the lock installed, I couldn’t even breathe the air safely because of the toxic fumes. There was simply too much radiation for me to absorb its momentum before it started giving me a killer tan on the inside, and breathing the nasty air was a hard no. A few minutes of that would shred my lungs, forcing a reset and wasting all the power I’d painstakingly gathered. It was the metabolic equivalent of spending eight hours earning minimum wage and then immediately blowing it all on a parking ticket.

  Solution? A helmet and a light hazard suit. The helmet was my own design, which is to say I’d ripped off every publicly available design I could find, smashed them together with the aesthetic grace of a drunk engineer, and added a set of miniature compressed air tanks. They were only rated for half an hour, but since I could cheat and use my power to filter and recompress the air inside them, they could last as long as my concentration did.

  I’d also been monkeying with the electronics. After much fumbling, I’d salvaged a BIOS from a pre-FAFO smartphone—a relic from a more innocent time—and rebuilt it into a new set of carbon microcircuits alongside five other superchips. It was hilarious and deeply depressing that I was wearing enough computing power on my head to run a small nation’s infrastructure, and I was using it to run software that was barely more sophisticated than a Tamagotchi. My HUD had an energy gauge (a hacked quantum displacement meter), a very basic graphics program, a text viewer with a downloaded power-listing wiki, an oxygen gauge, and… a clock. A very, very accurate clock. Behold the pinnacle of widgeteering: a five-trillion-dollar watch.

  Abigail had been after me to install something called a ‘Development AI’ to take advantage of all that raw processing power. I knew just enough about programming to know that most ‘AIs’ are just fancy sorting algorithms that assign weighted values to things. The problem was, the weighted AIs she was interested in were all created by other Alphas, specifically technopaths. I was paranoid enough that I didn’t want to stick a potential backdoor from a rival into the system that controlled my life support. I’d seen *2001*. I knew how this ended. Sure, HAL was only possible if someone programmed him to be a murderous lunatic, but I wasn’t keen on finding out what a bored Class Five cyberkinetic could do if I gave her a direct line into my helmet. I preferred my oxygen supply to remain un-weaponized, thank you very much.

  As I ran through the slow, deliberate exercises, I interspersed them with some Qigong motions I’d learned from sketchy online videos. Tai Chi was at least a semi-legitimate martial art. Qigong was almost exclusively for ‘energy flows’—a phrase that still made my inner scientist cringe. But between the two of them, I was cobbling together a methodology that actually worked. The proof was in the corner of my HUD, ticking upward with glacial slowness: 723 energy units. My own personal scoreboard in the game of ‘Don’t Die.’

  Each movement, each controlled breath (of my canned air), was an attempt to circulate that energy through the metaphysical blockages in my soul. Or my spirit. Or my whatever-the-hell Graviton was talking about. So far, my success has been limited. It was like trying to use a gentle breeze to blow down a brick wall. The blockages wiggled. They jiggled. They did not, however, budge. I was hoping that condensing the energy would turn my gentle breeze into a firehose, or, if I ever got strong enough, an industrial pressure washer capable of stripping paint and poor life choices.

  But it felt like a cosmic catch-22. The more I exercised, the more power I built, but it just stretched out my soul’s container rather than compressing it. I needed a catalyst, something more than just a simple vortex. The only way to increase the complexity of the flow seemed to be to… let it flow through the channels that were blocked. You see the problem.

  This was probably the biggest issue with ‘Momentum’ as my Dao. Things that inherently resisted momentum—concepts like Rigidity, Steadfastness, Stolidity, and Unyieldingness—were my kryptonite. I’d started mentally labeling the spiritual roadblocks I encountered. It was absurd, naming metaphysical concepts like they were Pokémon, but it helped. Some concepts, like Speed, Motion, or even elemental ones like Air, slid right into my energy pool to be purified into something useful. Others just sat there, immovable objects to my decidedly unstoppable force.

  The weirdest part was the sensation of a second pool of energy, deep beneath the one I was using. A different type, one I couldn’t interpret or touch. Every once in a while, it would spin out and subtly alter what I was doing. If I was right, it meant I had a latent second power, and my money was on it being the source of my Blueprint ability. It was weak, following its own bizarre spiritual pathways, as if it had its own separate set of metaphysical organs.

  My suspicion was that it was dormant, not fully awakened like my momentum control. Which, again, left me flailing in the dark. I’m a perfectionist, not an innovator. Give me a schematic, and I’ll improve it. Give me a tutorial, and I’ll master it. Give me the vast, uncharted frontier of my own soul and tell me to “figure it out,” and I’ll mostly just stand around feeling confused and slightly aggrieved. Why didn’t anyone write a manual for this? Was having two activated powers even a good idea, or would they just conflict and turn me into a messy explosion of contradictory physics?

  I finally called it quits, my energy having crawled its way to a whopping 725. To make real progress on compression, I’d need to go deeper into the tunnel, and I wasn’t confident I could strip energy from the more intense radiation before it started giving me super-cancer. Although if that’s what it took, I’d probably try it eventually. Desperation is a hell of a motivator.