Dread settled over my shoulders like a physical weight. My stomach was doing flips, and I had to brace myself against the table to keep from shaking. I fought the urge to scream in frustration, and it was a close match.

Morphosis hadn’t moved from his position at the head of the room, his eyes still closed and head bowed, his signal muted. This had to have been going on for a while, yet he’d shown no indication of having noticed. He was legendary for his strict and unyielding adherence to school rules, so I didn’t believe for a second that he was letting it go willingly.

It was strange to feel disappointed in a hero I looked up to. I wasn’t used to it.

If he hadn’t noticed it happening in the first place, I had zero faith he’d be able to find who was doing this. Maybe that was uncharitable. It was down to my low rank that I even had the signal sense to warn me a power was in use; what methods were open to him?

I could see several scenarios playing out if I told the invigilators what was happening, and I liked none of them.

Most likely, whoever was stealing my test answers would stop the moment they realised they’d been found out. Probably as soon as I raised my hand to get the invigilators’ attention. Maybe I’d get my work back in that scenario, but in all likelihood they’d still be able to copy down what they’d seen.

That didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t want a cheater to succeed.

Even worse, they could turn their attention to someone else—I couldn’t be the only one in the room who was visibly breezing through the test. With so little time left, there was no chance of going back over even half the questions.

I wasn’t willing to sacrifice someone else to the answer thief. No way.

A part of me knew there were other ways it could go. Maybe they’d pause the test or postpone it, launching an investigation until the culprit was found. In that scenario, no doubt everything would get solved nice and neatly.

Whether it was the confrontation with Lucas getting to me more than I thought or I was just in a vindictive mood, I wanted to deal with this myself.

I focused on the feel of the signal. I could tell it was coming from somewhere behind and to my right, though I couldn’t tell how far it was. It was a weak signal, and all I could feel was the vague, dream-like impression I tended to get. It buzzed at the back of my brain, made my stomach flip like I was falling.

I thought I’d conquered the distress that signals caused in me ages ago, but this situation was dredging that familiar dread back up. I took a deep breath. Had to beat it. Focus.

Making sure to keep my body language casual, I focused back on my test, chewing on the end of my pen and frowning as if I was considering the next problem. I leaned forward a little, hunching over my desk like so many of my fellow examinees were doing.

With my other hand, I lifted the paper a fraction, just enough to give me a view of the answers at the bottom of the previous page. Still there. I repeated the process, covertly leafing through the pages, until eventually I found what I was looking for.

The effect was like the cross-fade transition they used to use in old movies. A blur was slowly rolling over the page, gradually replacing my answers with lazy ink blotches line by line. I leafed back a bit further, seeing the same black stains.

A smile threatened to give me away, so I fought the urge.

It was balance, taking something ‘equal’ and swapping it. What constituted equality here was beyond me, but I didn’t need to know the details.

Now I knew the method of the power at play here, it was just a matter of countering them.

Letting out a quiet hiss, I ran my hands through my hair, affecting an air of frustration, then slumped over my desk. A few invigilators gave me the stink eye, but offered no rebuke.

I counted to ten in my head, then sat back up, as if with renewed determination.

Staying discreet, I lifted the corner of the page and checked the thief's progress.

This time, it was much harder to hold back a smile. Triumphant laughter was battering against the gates, and I was forced to duck my head to hide my face. My chest shook, but I managed to keep my shoulders still at least.

As a general rule, powers defied any general rules we tried to assign to them. Any time a group came up with a new theory of The Way Powers Worked, a thousand exceptions would come out of the woodwork. revelations always tripped researchers up. Some claimed no one could truly know a power but its wielder.

But that wasn’t to say there weren’t common themes. Power-granted senses, for example, did always have a giveaway, the sign just wasn’t necessarily intuitive. Powers granting the ability to manipulate some kind of dangerous material almost always made the wielder at least partially immune to the dangers of said material even at the foundation level. More often than not, someone who could move at ludicrous speeds would have some level of protection from, say, the air resistance that would flay them if physics worked on them like it was supposed to.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

(Their clothes often didn’t receive such protections, unfortunately.)

Point was, categorising powers could be useful, even if there were always special cases.

A few years ago, a team in Germany had set out to study what they called—roughly translated—incremental phase transition and substitution abilities. Their conclusions were long-winded, dry as the desert as one might expect from an academic paper, and quickly proven wrong in many cases by peer review. C’est la vie—or whatever the German version of the phrase was.

But there was one part that had, at the time I read it, yet to be proven wrong:

Incremental substitution powers requiring line of sight to switch two or more objects would reverse if the connection between the two or more objects was interrupted. In almost all cases, the powered individual had to end the swap themselves while both objects were still visible.

Best of all, the reversal was usually much faster than the swap.

Whoever you are, I thought, fuck you.

Of course I knew things were going to be competitive. That people were going to be out for themselves above all else and offering help to another student would be, from a certain perspective, jeopardising one’s own chances. I got it. I respected it, even, to a degree.

But actively trying to screw over other students for one's own gain?

No way was I going to let that go.

Prioritising one’s own interests was one thing, but this was still supposed to be a place for superheroes, for paragons of good and upholders of justice. What kind of hero would the person who was willing to do something like this going to become? The type that entered the cut-throat world of Los Angeles and ended up in prison for murdering another hero? Another corpo scumbag whose face ended up all over the news for helping their employers steal someone else’s tech?

An evil piece of shit that would let a known murderer attack a shopping mall to hurt a rival’s rep?

Fuck you, I thought again, my pencil cracking in my grip. Fuck you three times over.

I had to take long, deep breaths to calm down. Needed to keep my cool here. If I was going to screw this bastard over, there could be no indication that anything was wrong.

Their signal was still going, undaunted.

Checking my paper once more, I found that the swap had progressed again. I made a mental note of where it had progressed to, then rested my head in my hand, leaning over to block the view from behind and to the right. I searched my memory, trying to recall the faces I’d spotted in that direction. When I thought of it, the only person who’d been further back than me when I’d entered the room had been the smirking Asian girl, with the only other option being the greasy kid who arrived late, and I hadn’t had any reason to look behind me since, focused on the test.

Suspicion rose, but there was nothing I could do with it. Whether it was one of those two or not, it changed nothing. My strategy here was going to be the same.

Sitting up straight, I focused back on the paper before me. There were barely a dozen answers left in the test, and I flew through them as fast as I possibly could, sacrificing accuracy where I felt it was necessary.

Then I closed the test, placed my pencil down atop it, and slumped over so anyone sitting behind me and to my right would have no line of sight to my table.

It grated to leave a whole test in pencil without going back over it, but I was too high on vindictive satisfaction to worry about it too much. If everything worked out how I thought it would, if I’d calculated the speed of the substitution power’s reversal correctly, if they’d been unable to cancel the reversal of their substitution without line of sight like I theorised, I’d get at least 70% of my answers back, leaving me with what I was confident was an 85% score. An easy pass for the written exam.

The little cheater, on the other hand, would be lucky if they had 15%, and nowhere near enough time to copy an adequate number of answers off another student. Scanning around, no one seemed to be struggling too hard. Hopefully, there was too little time left for the thief to screw over someone else’s score, even if they couldn’t salvage their own.

Regardless, my stomach was still doing flips by the time Morphosis opened his eyes and straightened up, instantly alert. “Your time is up,” he said, and the shadow clock vanished with a huff of displaced air. “You will put down your pencils and pens, and close your tests.”

Everyone who hadn’t done so already hastened to obey. I sat up straight, hugging my test to my chest. I needed to keep my test out of the thief’s line of sight for as long as possible.

“The invigilators will collect your tests. You will remain seated until they have taken yours, at which point you will exit in an orderly fashion. You will then wait in the corridor outside. You will keep quiet throughout this process, as other tests are going on nearby.”

My heart was pounding as the staff moved along the rows. I was trying not to doubt my conclusions, telling myself that my plan fit with all the relevant research. But the temptation to open my test and look inside despite the risk of disqualification was so strong it was almost physically painful. In theory, my plan should have succeeded. Almost the entirety of my answers should have been returned, leaving me more than enough to pass.

But there was no way of knowing for sure. I wouldn’t know the result for days or even weeks.

I was shaking with nerves as I handed the invigilator my test and rose to my feet. I moved as if in a lucid dream to the front of the hall.

When I reached the door, I turned to survey the room.

In an instant, all my worries melted away.

It was strange to feel so good under the attention of a truly murderous glare. If the Asian girl from earlier had the power to shoot lasers from her eyes, I would have surely been reduced to a smouldering pile of ash.

Unfortunately for her, it seemed she only had the power to substitute matter via line of sight. A part of me wanted to ask her how it worked; it had to be a very interesting and precise power to literally swap ink and pencil she couldn’t actually see right out of a stack of papers.

The rest of me took vicious pleasure from giving her my most shit-eating smirk as I left the exam hall, revelling in the silence as her signal died out.