My stomach growled as I rolled over, and realized I was not wearing anything when I crashed. Not terribly uncommon, but I had stopped doing that altogether when my ex had kicked me to the curb. Mindy was leaning over me, her hand resting on my shoulder and sort of gently rolling me to wake me up. Nice outfit, a delicately clingy blue lace-edged top over jeans.

I blinked out her owlishly and groaned. “Quick reality check, did I walk from the shower to the bed naked in front of half of the third floor? Please tell me it was just an ‘in school naked’ nightmare.”

She shook her head, “No, it happened. What the hell happened to you?”

I groaned and sat up on the bed, pulling the cover over my waist. “I was in… I guess a tinker’s frenzy?”

She looked a little confused, “What’s that?”

I sighed, “I am not actually a tinker, but it was kind of similar. Sort of a fugue state during crafting, I guess. You sort of forget everything. I mean, it’s happened to me before, but it usually only lasts an hour or two.” I looked around frantically, “The baggies… do you have the baggies? I blueprinted them, but I can’t let anyone else have them!”

She nodded and pointed towards my desk, where I relaxed as I realized that the baggies were sitting on top of my laptop. “So what is so important about them, before I innocently compare their appearance to something humiliating like hair or sand?”

I laughed a little, “Give me a few minutes to get up and put on some clothes and I will tell you. Is Abbey here? What time is it?”

She nodded, taking a step back, “Almost six. I figured you’d probably be hungry. All you ate was a couple of eggs and a bottle of water. Abbey’s out in the lounge, almost tearing her eyes out in curiosity,” she smiled a little, “and you might as well just get dressed, it’s not like almost everyone on the third floor doesn’t know what you look like naked, big boy.”

I groaned and flopped my head into the pillow, before tossing off the blanket. Mindy quickly gulped and turned, and then shot out of my door, carefully closing it behind her.

Smartass deserved to blush. I wasn’t a big or a little boy, I considered myself average, although I didn’t exactly have much basis for comparison. People tended to give you funny looks if you started asking the guys in the gym shower to measure and compare. Or maybe they’d consider it flirting. I do know that I was bigger than Jerry, at least according to him, but he mostly made jokes about how I’d make a terrible boyfriend because any guy I jumped would need a colostomy bag.

Still, big boy? Was that an insult or a compliment? Was she just making fun of me? I sighed deeply and started grabbing my civvies for dinner. Afterward, I’d come back and switch to my school outfit for the teamwork exercise.

Afterward, I met up with both of the girls and two more that were on our floor, as we headed to the mess hall. One of those girls was another rush named Cynthia Green, a slender blonde who could have passed as Mindy’s sister, and the other one was named Aria Gonzalez, a slightly shorter brunette with extremely long black hair who looked like she belonged in spike heels on a Mexican Soap Opera. I had no idea what their super names were, and unlike Abbey, they didn’t immediately blurt it out when we met.

Then again, Abbey was apparently very good at making friends quickly. Nonthreatening and friendly, she was only shy around me at first because I was a guy, I think. Once we were headed up the elevator, Cynthia and Aria split off to go eat off-campus.

“So? So?” Abbey asked me.

I smiled a little, my new secrets hidden safely in my pockets. “The first one is an organic-synthetic fiber. After Mindy’s and your suggestions, I looked up carbon nanotubes and made multi-walled nanotubes almost a millimeter in length. I am not the first one to do that, but I blended it with synthetic spider silk. I know it’s not a big deal, but now that I have it blueprinted, I can start gathering the stuff and spending the energy to create really stupidly durable costumes, so we don’t have any costume errors.”

“So how would it compare to geofiber?”

I grinned, “It would blow geofiber out of the water easily. Then again, geofiber is a cheap version of Alexander Morita’s original Atlas threading, which is probably comparable. Most importantly, I blueprinted it, so given enough time, I should be able to make a real costume or two out of it. It’s not that it’s better, it’s that it won’t cost us four million to hope for a decently durable suit.”

She nodded slightly, “So why were you so excited?”

I shrugged, “Because I made it, and only I can make it… for a fraction of the cost of Atlas threading. It’s going to take a long time, and this stuff can’t be sewn easily so it might take a lot of fittings to get it the perfect size, but that means I can do my job as Mindy’s sponsored support without breaking the bank.”

Mindy blushed again, but Abbey asked, “So what was the other thing?”

I grinned at her, “Bear in mind, I just looked online for this stuff… I am no engineer or genius, but Doctor Kinihara proposed the design. That, Abbey, is the world’s first molecular integrated circuit. Well, actually it’s a lot of them. Microvoltage regulators, a thousand terabytes of superdynamic RAM, five hundred and twelve cores each running at sixteen gigahertz.

Mindy nodded, “What does that mean?”

Abbey snorted, “That means certain companies would geld themselves for a supply line. That’s very fast, can you create a production line?”

I shook my head, “No. I don’t know how to do that, or even make micromanipulators on that scale, yet. But it’s possible. Right now, though, I have it blueprinted… with some basic ingredients, I can create about a dozen of those a day, assuming I don’t need to save energy for something else.”

“So what use are they?”

I sighed, “I am not sure, yet. I was just proud of making it. It’s a very small, very powerful computer… I am betting it will be useful, at least eventually.”

“Most importantly, though, I also managed to bang together a synthetic myofibril and merge them into artificial myocytes.”

“ooh! Tensile strength? How much mass?”

Mindy just looked confused.

I grinned, “Not much, I was trying to follow along with natural muscles. The tensile strength is based around multilayered nanotubes, but I made both slow-twitch and fast-twitch, although considering the basic tensile strength… Let’s just say that pound-for-pound it’s about thirty-six times as durable, and eight times as strong, as Ogre.”

Mindy looked shocked, “Sex-tape Ogre?”

I nodded, “I mean, yeah, there are lots of potential issues, but I have the brain, and now I have the body, to make an artificial human and start the robot revolution! Hahaha!” I started cackling madly.

Mindy gave me a weird look, but Abbey snorted, “And you thought I was the one trying to be a supervillain!”

I grinned, “I think I would make a pretty good supervillain. But no, it would be good fun, but I couldn’t ever get into the whole psychopath thing. I was actually thinking of improved conflict suits for normies or possibly even prosthetics. These are not widgeteer tech. There are a lot of problems to iron out, like power supplies and programming which I suck at, but with a neurosim pack and trans-vr, I could see making something that could give a single soldier a real chance against the mutants, maybe even Kaiju.”

“But only you can make them?”

I nodded at Abbey, “Right now, yes. But not forever, I hope… I will probably need to find some actual tech geniuses to help me design anything better, coders, that kind of thing, so I will never really get the cackling mad genius thing working. Those guys do everything themselves.”

I smiled a little, “Mostly I want to protect the people that are in the real fight. Heroes, even villains… they're still protecting humanity and protecting me. If that means I need to wear a lab coat and giant glasses and act like an evil idiot, then so be it.”

Mindy nodded, “So you are a real believer in heroes?”

I nodded, “Yes and no. I am not an idiot, I know that more than a few of them abuse their privileges, but as long as they aren’t true sickos, the moment a Kaiju shows up I will put on my minidress and pompoms and cheer with the best of them.”

Mindy looked at me oddly, “But you don’t want to be a superhero.”

I laughed, “Oh no. It’s not a matter of don’t want to, it’s a matter of can’t. I grew up dreaming of being a hero just like every other boy, but when I awakened… let’s just say that it was driven into me quite firmly that I will never, ever be the equal of even a true class three. Those exact words. I have plenty of tricks, but in the end, I’m just a normie with a gimmick.”

As I headed towards the cafeteria lines I heard Mindy and Abbey whispering. Girl stuff, probably.

***

The Arena was set up in a very interesting way. Sort of a tightly-packed grid, like old New York, before it turned into Empire City, with a lot of heavy detritus scattered about. The floor of the Arena could be lifted and lowered like one of those nail tables that you can put your hand under and lift a picture of the palm of your hand, and while the actual flooring and rectangles raised were damned close to immune to any sort of damage, a series of holoprojectors projected a surprisingly realistic looking set of buildings.

The ‘enemies’ for the scenario were a roaming set of drones, controlled by a Widgeteer named Heathcliff. They were vaguely catlike, and from what I could tell extremely inexpensive, being made from wood and wrought iron, but each one of the two dozen roamers was roughly the size and strength of a human and considerably more durable.

The mission was simple. There were a series of ‘dummies’ simulating unconscious victims of a wall-break, stashed in various locations throughout the huge arena. The teams were split and had to deal with the roamers trying to get to the ‘victims’, while the active members of the team fought them off and the civilian rescue workers tried to save them.

The teams were not… terrible. Okay, the normies and rescuer workers were not terrible; they tried to keep focus when they discovered a victim, and some of them had some rescue worker experience.

The teams themselves, though, were less than stellar when fighting the roamers.

The biggest problem was that most of the remedial teamwork alphas were in remedial teamwork for a very good reason. They were balanced or tilted towards defense, which, while great for a primary combatant, also meant that many of them were a lot more interested in working solo, and it showed.

“So teamwork credits are required to graduate?” I asked in confusion as we watched the main arena floor, as well as various close-circuit systems that let us keep an eye on details.

Mister Dexter shook his head, “Not to graduate, this is, after all, a school with a variety of programs, but to progress with certain certifications teamwork has to be completed.”

I watched as one of the second team’s primaries, a girl that seemed to be able to telekinetically control metal, broke off to attack one of the drones that had dived in to attack like a wolf and then backed off.

This wouldn’t have been a bad idea, except that she basically ignored the people trying to wrestle the dummy out from under a propped-up and burnt-out vehicle of some sort. I managed to get up a kinetic air screen in time to keep the vehicle from smashing down onto the workers, but that was the fourth time I’d had to intercede to keep someone from getting seriously hurt, and I’d blown off over two hundred energy in the process.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Mister Dexter looked at me curiously, “You know I saw that, right? Do you care to tell me how you did it? No one else was paying attention as it fell, not even Catling, who was right under where it would have fallen.”

I nodded, wiping sweat off my forehead. “I figured you did. I can only handle very small volumes, but I never said I had poor control.”

He nodded, “So you what… you telekinetically held the debris in order to keep it upright long enough for them to get the test dummy out from under it?”

I shrugged, “Close, are you an alpha?”

He shook his head, “No, but I worked around, with, and against them for fifteen years. You begin to recognize the signs.”

I chuckled, “Yeah, it wasn’t telekinetic, even though the difference is hard to explain. Telekinesis involves moving things remotely as if you manipulated them. In my case, I stripped the kinetic energy of the thin moisture and air layer that clung to one side of the wreckage.”

“What's the difference?”

I sighed, “The difference is that telekinetics impart motion to an entire object. I alter momentum to a small part of it, and it costs me. Just trying to help out a little bit has burned through a lot of my energy reserves. Will the test be over soon?”

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

I sighed, “Yes. Call me a jerk, but I am not as forgiving as you.” I started pointing out the different people in the test. “Right now, I would flunk almost all of them. The girl in red is just excited to have something to beat up. That other girl there is just so in love with her powers that she looks for any excuse, and already would have killed her team three times.”

“Chinook is mentally someplace else and might as well not even be here for more than five minutes at a time. That one, the heavy brick-looking girl? She needs serious retraining… I don’t know if it’s her teamwork, or if her power makes her too slow to be useful, but she shouldn’t even be in a teamwork class if she spends all her time in that form. The cat-looking one, Catling, shouldn’t be here either, but that’s because she’s already working well with a team, the same for those two guys without superhero names and the girl with that arc welder power.”

He nodded, “Most of the skilled ones you pointed out are in remedial teamwork because of… administrative reasons. Good eye.”

I chuckled, “I have had bad tactics driven into me repeatedly. The weak man never learns, since he never risks failure. The wise man learns from his own mistakes, but the smart man learns from the mistakes of others. I try to be wise, but I won’t claim to be that smart.”

He nodded, “I can’t really flunk any of them unless they fail the written, which is absurdly easy. Once they are in the regular teamwork classes, they can be shipped back to remedial, but some might decide to join Monster Hunter Scouts instead, and just dodge teamwork altogether. It strictly limits their future employment opportunities, but repeatedly failing teamwork is often a wake-up call that some people just aren’t meant to be part of the whole superhero community.”

“Hold that thought.” I said, and practiced the ‘new and improved’ form of transportation I had been working on.

My earlier teleportation had involved disassembling myself, moving to a location, and then restoring myself. I guess it wasn’t technically teleportation, since I never lost consciousness, and I actually had to travel the intervening distance. In a real way, it involved doing enough damage to myself to break my molecular structure down to free molecules, using my talents to move myself to my new location, and then ‘restoring’ my body’s last blueprint, the one I took when I broke myself down.

It required a sick amount of energy, was fairly painful, and was slow as hell. It wasn’t even really teleportation, because solid structures blocked me. Admittedly even a small crack was enough to pass the molecules through, but I was no jumper. A solid airtight surface, or even water, was dense enough to keep me from moving through it.

My new version was a LOT more efficient. Now that I had a little ‘give’ to my soul energy, I could steal the energy from the molecular breakdown and store it until I needed to use it for reassembly. It was well known that I had improved reflexes, strength, and durability, but I could ‘choose’ to leave a trail of kinetically-aggressive ions behind me as I traveled much faster than before.

It still was not perfect, but when I moved, instead of just becoming a sort of nasty-looking cloud flickering close to the ground, I became a much hazier cloud that flicked to a location. The best part was, if I left the ion trail, it disturbed the air, trended to pull in dust and debris, and made my path obvious.

In other words, it left a visible trace of my passage, and I could use the energy I gained from de-resolution to help pay off the reset. The best part was, that the whole ‘launch’ part added enough energy to my soul space, that it helped to stretch the bounds of my soul very effectively. The distance I could move was still limited by how long I could use energy to push my free-floating molecules to their destination, but so far I’d managed to clock my speed at close to 70 miles per hour. I didn’t know EXACTLY how long I could stay suspended, but as long as I still had ten percent of my energy, I could reform.

If I couldn’t reform, I guess I would be dead, which was why I was so careful about using it, and I’d managed to convince the people who had seen it so far, namely Mindy and Abigail, that I had some kind of kinetic ‘dash’ or ‘jump’ skill. They were not technically wrong, I just wasn’t in a solid form when I dashed, simply because my power didn’t work that way.

Technically, the term teleportation didn’t apply at all, but it was what I had used mentally forever, just like what I did wasn’t really telekinesis. It wasn’t apportation either, since that involved pulling things, like the way elementals yanked and formed matter out of the ether. I decided that all things considered, I was going to call it my ‘Ghost Dash’. It sounded cool, and sort of fit the bill, especially since I didn’t have to leave a charged Ion trail, I just did that so people would think it was some sort of super speed. Special effects were important.

Yeah, Now I was ‘in’ the battlefield, but when Brickhouse girl… that was my name for her since I didn’t actually know her super name… smashed the drone into a pile of debris, it had ticked over even more debris and caught blowtorch girl. She had a big, nasty, bleeding gash in her right leg that had ripped right through the costume. The school costumes were pretty decent, but they were absolutely not designed for getting hit by a razor-sharp chunk of rusty car hood propelled at close to a hundred miles an hour.

“Who? What?” the guy with a mustache, a baseline human who had already wrapped a tourniquet around the crying girl’s leg asked as I was suddenly… there.

“I’m Blueprint, auditing the class. Hold her still. Miss?”

“Kelly!” she gasped, “I am Kelly!”

“Right, Kelly, I am going to fix your leg up, okay? But it’s going to be a little uncomfortable for a moment since your femoral artery was nicked. You, mustache, good job. You probably saved her life.” I said. Okay, yes… it looked like an artery hit, there was blood all over the ground, which meant a little more work. It would suck to repair her leg and suddenly watch her have a heart attack from low blood pressure.

The cut was pretty deep, but not particularly tearing, and well within my new short range. Instead of having to give her a restore, I could simply reconnect everything. The artery was, of course, my first target, and there were already some dying cells within the muscles of her leg, but there was no real guesswork involved.

“Mustache Guy?”

“Dave”

“Hey, Dave,” I said, holding her wound closed as I started reconnecting the blood vessels and tracing the nerves in her muscles. Thank goodness her bone wasn’t broken, since restoring bones with all of the complicated blood-production structures in the marrow was much harder work than simple muscles.

“Buddy, I need you to start loosening her tourniquet. I already have her artery restored, but I need you to keep your fingers on her pulse and tell me if it starts getting thready or stops, okay?” I looked around and noticed brick girl, who looked like she was trying not to cry. “Hey you, klutz. Can you change out of that form for a second? I need someone to start sponging out the wound as I close it, and it’s going to be seeping a bunch of dirt and metal and crap.”

She nodded, and she suddenly looked like a cute little Japanese girl in her holo-mask, the kind that should be buying Pockey from vending machines and screaming over boy bands and stuffed animals rather than dressed in a super suit. Dave nodded towards the medkit he’d yanked out when the girl went down, and the fan service extra from a Godzilla movie grabbed a handful of gauze.

I started pulling the fabric away from the now slowly seeping wound as Dave slowly released the pressure on the cloth that cut off her leg’s circulation, and I guessed watching her muscles and veins visibly pulling themselves back together had given him enough trust to believe I knew what I was doing.

That, and he’d given the girl a tranquilizer, which meant she was in happy land right now. I was doing it slowly enough to see for two reasons… the first reason was that I wanted people to be able to see that it worked since the closed-circuit cameras were watching this scene just as closely as Dave and Suki, and I also wanted the Brickhouse fangirl to feel both guilty and useful, and for people not to realize I could have healed the whole thing in less than a heartbeat. Cells were a lot slower to push around than molecules and worked at an entirely different speed.

“Start sponging.” I told the Babymetal extra, “Right into the wound… Dave here gave her a painkiller, she’s feeling amazing. Dave? Pulse?”

He nodded to me, “Pulse is a little thready, but I don’t think she’s down more than three quarts. Emergency should be able to put some plasma into her.”

I nodded and started forcing all the dirt, metal, rust, and other crap right out of the open surface of the wound as I healed up the muscle right behind it. I blueprinted her red blood cells and started pushing reset whole blood into her system, pulling from my protein reserves. “Don’t bother. I’m giving her whole blood as we speak. Keep sponging, Akyo.”

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

I looked back at her quirking an eyebrow, “I didn’t. I don’t know your name, but Akyo was Dire Badger’s girlfriend, and it was the only Japanese girl’s name I could remember off the top of my head. Would you rather I called you killer?”

She shook her head rapidly, returning to her sponging, which wasn’t necessary since I had sealed up the wound already. Kelly would have a vivid red mark for a while, but she should be okay. It was never necessary, since as long as there wasn’t a giant chunk caught in the wound it was easy to nudge any contaminants out while I was sealing it, but having to help clean the wound would hopefully teach her a lesson about paying attention to power backlash and collateral damage.

Yeah, it was probably stupid. I wasn’t her teacher, friend, or parent, but someday I might have to fight alongside ‘Terracotta’ and I didn’t want her to be more of a threat than any enemy we faced. You can’t cure stupid, but you could train away some of its effects.

Dave shook his head at me, “Man, you got that mixed up. Great job, by the way, I don’t think I have seen such a clean power heal ever.”

I lifted my hands, which were, unfortunately now covered with blood. Useless blood, since it was contaminated outside of her body, but it did make a decent dye if you weren’t too picky. “Hey, Dave. Sorry, when I am concentrating I just name people things in my head if I don’t know their real name. What did I get mixed up? I promise that it’s not her blood type, since I cloned her own blood.”

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

“Huh. Seriously? I thought that Akyo was the one Dire Badger was getting gooey with who got turned into the herald of Arcanus and was with those mystic slaughter guys.” The best part about comic book superheroes was that for the most part, their adventures were sort of made up by the writer.

Did Mysteria and Doctor Oddball have epic clashes? Absolutely, but except for the actually visible fighting, those clashes were almost entirely classified, and the whole nemesis thing existed only in the pages of the comics. In fact, there was even a question about whether Doctor Oddball was still alive since he hadn’t been seen in over a decade.

Dave shook his head and sighed in exasperation. Okay, I had followed the comics a little when I was younger, but Dave was apparently a deep immersion comic geek… which might be why he was working as a team support even if he was entirely human. There, but for the whim of fate, I might have gone.

“No, that was Kamiko, Madame Deathstrife.”

I facepalmed and suddenly realized I had just covered my mask with blood. Crap. Well, at least it matched the front of my costume, arms, thighs, and boots now. If what I was trying to do to expand my powers WAS cultivation, at least I wasn’t stuck in an authentic Xianxia Chinese Magical Period Drama. All of those identical-sounding names would drive me crazy.