New class schedule. I’d gotten a very interesting message on the network from the BSA testing facility, and I wasn’t sure how to react. No one, as far as I knew, had ever gotten an audit result where the BSA auditors said that your power class was a sliding scale. Four to six.

Seven classes. I mean, I understood why, especially after I tested out of Materials Logistics, business logistics, and business management. I knew that in traditional colleges, business and supply chain management courses tend to be front-loaded, but universities didn’t exist to educate students, they existed to make students pay as much as possible for a piece of official-looking paper that stated that they educated, and knew how to kiss ass.

Don’t get me wrong, Logistical mathematics was sort of complicated when you were first exposed to it, but compared to quantum equations, orbital mechanics, or even actuarial calculations that every insurance company used to keep from going broke, were far more complicated.

I was very well aware of the fact that being smart in one area did not make you smart in anything else. Those intellectual bobble-heads who thought having a high IQ naturally meant they should rule the world were idiots because intelligence wasn’t divided up so easily… sure, I had a natural cheat for quantum mechanics in the form of my power, but as I had learned the hard way, specialization only meant you were competent in your specialization.

I’d sort of started SSS as a test, and it was probably a test I failed. It survived, but Abbey was right, that if I’d kept trying to run Doyle Routing I’d have probably run it into the ground. Sure, I’d have kept the trucks running, right up until the company went bankrupt because of all of the OTHER stuff I didn’t understand, or even care about.

The hardest part of a company was people skills. I forced myself to learn all of the other junk, business management, accounting, and tax law, but running a real business was a thousand more things, that took other people with other skills, and the ability to judge who actually had those skills and who was just padding a resume.

So, when I went to the Student Union after testing out of the stupidly simple parts of a Logistical degree, I tried to focus on those skills.

Of course, Kellar Academy had its own idea of what I should be learning over the next four years since they were training people to protect the human race rather than just getting a good job. The classes were just the time you spent in a classroom, and every student was expected to spend the majority of their ‘free’ time training in other ways.

In fact, my only two ‘official’ college-style courses were Advanced Anatomy and Game Theory one, both of which applied every bit as much to Alpha logistics as they did to civilian life.

Between those, was basic teamwork, of course, combat logistics, Kaiju tactics, power exploitation(transformative), and, Bob had made his power felt, Tai Chi as my physical credit.

I was a little bothered. I mean, I knew some martial arts, but wouldn’t an advanced martial art have been more useful? I was still a little iffy about the metaphysical stuff. I mean, yeah, it might help, but it might also be a colossal waste of time. Still, it couldn’t be too awful, since millions of people practiced it every day, but millions of people COULD be wrong. I guess I was going to find out.

The thing is, most courses in a college contain about as much total information as a Wikimedia article over the entirety of the course. The rest of the time was filled with examples, exercises, tests, and memorizing important things like the line of different mathematicians who came up with the theory, the dates when it happened, and all the rest.

Kellar Academy didn’t pull that. It was more like an educational boot camp. Advanced anatomy was a deep delve into every part of the human body and how they worked, healing methods, diagnostics, and development at different ages for different body types.

Then again, it wasn’t about training teachers, it was all about practical applications. I guess that was the big difference between a school and an academy.

I was sitting in my room, at my small and somewhat disposable desk, when I heard a knock at my door. “Jacob?”

“Yep!” I answered, closing up the syllabus sheets. In my opinion, preparation was ninety-nine percent of my job, and I’d been trying to get ready for the beginning of courses tomorrow. It was a Sunday, but after finding and attending a small chapel on campus at noon, I’d decided that just poking through my coursework was relaxing enough. I wouldn’t say I was particularly religious, but the chapel was both a good way to meet people and it’s better to be safe than sorry. One day I’d be dead, and I’d rather be wrong than miss the bus because I was a snob.

Besides, magic was real, maybe God was too.

“Hey, umm… a rather tall woman named Candace Windwalker is here and wants to umm… take you out. As your sponsor, I think it might be a good idea.”

“Windwalker? Wait, is it Chinook?”

“Yes. She says she has a bribe to join the team.”

I chuckled, and started putting on a jacket, “She doesn’t really need a bribe,” I said as I opened the door. “So far she’s… a decent anchor, compared to some of the others, So I am inclined to give her a shot. Have you decided on whether or not you are wanting to bring on Akyo?”

She nodded, “I sort of do. I know she’s got too much potential for collateral damage inside of a city, but she can also help repair that collateral damage if we have reconstruction duties, and outside the city, her limits pretty much stop existing.”

I nodded, “Then if you are cool, extend both of them invitations. Akyo’s pretty smart once you get past the shyness thing, and for right now she’s a good bet. We might need to replace her year three or four since she’s flat-out stated that she’s heading home after graduation, but that’s a long way away.”

Candace Windwalker was sitting at our table when I walked in and got to her feet. Huh. If she weren’t going to be a teammate, and if she wasn’t an alpha, I might have been attracted. Clever eyebrows, black hair to her waist, moderately deep tan skin, and a strong but not overwhelming nose. Kind of a live-action Pocahontas look, the cartoon, not the incredibly homely reality.

She had high cheekbones and a plump lower lip without makeup that professional models paid big bucks to achieve, and while she wasn’t voluptuous, the jeans and short red midriff tee she was wearing showed off a trim stomach, and a definite athlete’s body. The fact that she was almost my height with her heels wasn’t really off-putting so much as surprising. I wasn’t huge, but at six foot three I wasn’t short either, which, considering her heels, must have put her at slightly over six feet tall.

“Gee. I won’t even conjecture your super ID.” I said, giving her a once-over and making it clear I wasn’t checking her out.

She shrugged, “Not too worried about it. Yours is pretty obvious too, since there aren’t that many alphas that look like you. Anyway, I plan on bribing you.”

“Bribing me with what? I don’t really need money, and I’m reasonably certain that you are already aware that you are on the team’s shortlist.”

She smiled, “Come with me and I will show you. It’s on campus.”

I glanced at Mindy, and she nodded. I guess she already knew what the bribe would be.

“Fine, but I can’t stay up too late. It’s a school night, and mommy wants me home before curfew,” I smirked.

She nodded and walked out the door, me following her.

***

“You have got to be kidding me. What the hell?” I asked as the lift settled deep beneath the innovation building.

“Widgeteers need training too,” she replied, “and so do tinkers. Most people call this the failboat, because the widgeteers, failed student work, and even tinker junk wind up here.”

It was a set of underground cages, like a private storage facility except anything but private. It was a series of warehouses, many of them the size of a stadium, filled with...junk. Nothing biological, of course, since apparently that stuff was kept in cold storage under the medical training center, but it had the junk sort of separated by type and function.

“When students need… more specialized and working equipment for experimentation or crafting, well, you have to go through the regular grant process. Some of the better tinkers walk out of school with multi-million dollar loans, but tinkers… well, unlike Widgeteers, a lot of them will walk out and then right into a multinational research environment that will be happy to pay for their development loans.”

“On the other side are crafting rooms. Safety-sealed with good ventilation, and a bunch of them have special crafting equipment, from old-school forges and machine shops to enchanting bays for the weirdos that need them. You need to sign up for room time, and are expected to clean up after yourself.”

“Each of the rooms has an ordering terminal. As long as it’s reasonably marked as educational raw materials, a lot of it’s covered by the school accounts, and you can put what you are working on in a storage bay.”

“This is where it gets tricky, though. Finished development is technically Academy property, although it’s a little weird because it’s linked to your BSA account. You have to get stuff approved by a faculty member before you can use it in training or competition.”

“What about Patents and stuff?”

She scratched her head, “I am not really sure, but from what I understand, you aren’t considered an employee of the school. That means if you invent some new method or something that can be patented, it belongs to you… but if you do it with others, including actual school employees, the ownership might be more complicated.”

She shrugged, “What I do know is that if you intend to use hazardous materials, like radioactive materials, you need to run it through one of the staff members.”

“Does that include power training?”

She laughed, “I think so, but you need to ask your power exploitation trainer. They can get permission for you if it’s needed. I had to… request some special materials my first year.”

I raised an eyebrow, “Really? What?”

She quirked a half-smile, “I was only a single-awakening. My grandfather told me I could awaken elemental spirits if I underwent a spirit journey, and he was right.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

I was extremely interested, “Wait, your power increased at that time? How?”

She smiled, “I went on my spirit journey, found my spirit animal, the owl, and gained the power of the wind. I wish I could tell you more, but based on the fact that your own ability seems to be growing, perhaps I should ask you for help instead.”

“I know this really isn’t a bribe, once your teacher found out your powers extend to manipulating materials too, she would probably have dragged you down here, eventually… but umm… the Whispernet says you are going to be encouraged to maximize your healing ability, because you are a true healer.”

I snorted and started peering through the cages. Yes! I could use this stuff. I wasn’t likely to get any patents, because my secret nickname for myself wasn’t Blueprint, it was Knock-off. I wasn’t an inventor, everything in Mindy’s armor had been designed by someone else, but I had successfully made it smaller and cheaper, if not quite as good as the original. I was willing to bet that there were armor sets out there that were MUCH better than mine, but I doubted they were made on a budget.

“I am not sure what you mean by Whispernet or true healer. I am pretty good at fixing stuff, including traumas, but I don’t know what that true bit is about.”

She shrugged, “There are more than a few minor healing abilities running around. We have two at our school… a third-year empath who can share damage among herself and up to four other people, and a bio-controller who can create cloned biomatter, including stuff like organs, skin, and blood, who can help surgeons replace and repair injuries.”

“The Whispernet is just what it sounds like… second through fourth-year students who gossip. A lot of them work on special projects with the teachers, and some are actually employed by the school. They get a lot of rumors from the staff side of things, and the rumors coming out of there are that the Academy is going to try and encourage you to work for the BSA as a floating specialist.”

“Encourage me? Like, a deal I can’t refuse?” I asked, sourly.

She shook her head, “No. more like lots of money and whatever you want or need for a contract. That’s where the true healer thing comes in. Video of you working on Kelly were leaked and somehow got out past the school’s security. Three of the farmer families have already contacted the academy demanding you be shipped to them immediately for training, and the only reason there haven’t been more is because the leak was found and, well, farmer families are good at keeping secrets.”

Quick history lesson. About three decades after the turn of the millennium, back when Alphas were rare, the highest ever recorded was a class five. There were only a few ‘big Kaiju’ running around because showing their heads almost always provoked a deadly response from alphas and military forces alike.

Aside from that big sucker in the Pacific that trashed Tokyo in the seventies before getting driven back into the trench, Kaiju would be turned into mincemeat if they ever appeared inland, aside from a few outbreaks of mutated housepets, wild animals that developed alpha traits, and the occasional mad-scientist designed abomination that broke free from it’s creator and laid waste before it was brought down.

But politicians, curse their rotten little hearts, were always looking for ways to gain more power. The exact circumstances of what happened were buried under a mountain of misinformation, top-secret designations, and in some cases, a literal mountain, like what happened to D.C.

At any rate, a certain group of strongly corporate-connected people were trying to rule the world, other people were disagreeing with them, and the first tactical Q-Bomb was dropped on South Korea since what had happened to Poland in the forties.

It was called the ‘Faafo’, or ‘Fuck around and find out.’ moment. Europe, the USA, and the Russian Empire were involved, then China, the Middle East, India, Brazil, and eventually even Australia got caught up and the Q-Bombs only stopped after a lot of damage was done. Q-Bombs had a maximum destruction radius, were much cheaper per kiloton than conventional explosives, and didn’t cause fallout like nuclear weapons, but what happened afterward should have been on the minds of the greedy corporate warmongers that started it, not the simple destruction.

A lot more people started awakening and gaining an attachment to etheric power. Where before you could count the number of true ‘alphas’ in each nation on one hand, now they were tenfold. This caused a host of problems, from class three bank robbers and drug dealers to a slew of new monstrosities forming in the wilderness… the first time some people realized there was a new Kaiju problem was when the vicious old dinosaur that had been occasionally terrorizing Tokyo for decades washed up on the beach in two separate, rotting pieces.

For a few years, simple survival was a huge issue. People started fleeing to the overcrowded cities for protection, and famine was rearing its ugly head, but with the new crop of Alphas, new and unexpected gifts, like people that could grow crops in minutes instead of seasons, rose to the challenge.

The old power ranking system, based entirely on destructive potential, went from class D negligible to class A, the ability to destroy an entire block with one power use, had to be discarded entirely and replaced with something more organic based on your power potential, energy levels, and each power would be graded separately and the grading averaged to determine your new ranking… which was how I wound up as a class two. I probably should have been a class one, but the fact that my microkinesis could have flipped the safety and pulled the trigger on a firearm remotely, despite its weakness, pushed it into the ‘slightly dangerous’.

Today, lots of less civilized areas, ghost towns, and suburbia, were abandoned to the beasts which desperately hungered to empower themselves by eating sapients. Some deeply rural areas survived, due to preparation or the activities of local Alphas, and some didn’t. Right now, some of the wealthier rural areas that produce the food and luxuries in bulk that cities desperately need were stupidly rich.

These were referred to as ‘Farmer Families’. Outside of the cities, they were a law unto themselves, without any oversight or nod to any power outside of themselves. They often owned big chunks of the cities themselves, all financed by ‘outside’ production, salvage, and labor, and these families could, and did, work hard to seduce the most useful and powerful alphas to their cause.

Of course, when the big kaiju, invasions, or real world-ending nutball attacked, the farmer family teams assisted just like anyone else… even the best of the best couldn’t hope to stave off the combined might of the BSA in this country if they were deemed to be an uncooperative threat, but outside of that? The golden rule prevailed… he who had the gold made the rules.

I was beginning to understand now why I was considered a kidnapping risk. I would probably get some monster offers through covert channels sooner or later, but I had zero interest in being ‘owned’ by some farmer family, no more than I wished to be owned by the BSA. Farmer families, though, were known for getting what they wanted. A simple kidnapping, no matter how valuable the BSA might consider my potential, wouldn’t be enough to mobilize a nationwide response. The BSA knew it, the farmer families knew it, and now I knew it.

And the Farmer families had some stupidly powerful alphas on their payroll. Sure, I might think that I could escape, but if a powerful empath decided that you would fall in love with a farmer family and be permanently loyal, it would happen. They were called ‘families’ for a reason since few things ensured loyalty as efficiently as marrying into a family and hopefully producing a passel of potentially superpowered children.

Power tended to pass in lines, and if your genetic father got his powers from getting trapped in a furnace just as it was being lit, and your mother got them from being at ground zero in a gas line explosion, there was a really good chance that turning a flamethrower on you after you hit your majority would give you a similar power. It was not guaranteed, but the farmer families were brutally pragmatic about protecting their advantages, including ensuring that their ‘super families’ would awaken.

“Well, shit,” I said.

“Not exactly eloquent, but definitely to the point. Right now you are an unknown factor, like a stream coming from a cave having flecks of gold in it… it might be a decent mine, or it might be a money pit, but umm… Subvector asked me for a personal favor.”

I raised an eyebrow, “What personal favor did the Academy’s Master-at-arms request?”

She smiled slightly, “She asked me to try and get on your team, and, if I can, to play bodyguard and help you protect yourself by, and I quote, any means necessary. Unquote.”

We had moved well past the organized section of the vaults and were getting deeper into unfinished tunnels, but I felt something egging me on. The floor was still concrete plates, but the lights were getting older and more spaced out, and I think I even saw the occasional old-school LED tube flickering that had to be over fifty years old.

“Here.” I pointed to a beat-up shaft that was not even covered by a door. It was dark, and while there were electrical lines leading down into the pit, nothing was lit.

But what was COMING from that tunnel… I took a deep cleansing breath and held it for several moments. Helium two, excess high-speed protons and electrons, even the occasional zippy neutron. I grabbed all of the excess momentum, EXACTLY the kind of energy I needed, and reformed the remains into clean hydrogen, by far the easiest puzzle to assemble.

For the first time, I was starting to feel my excess energy bulge my soul container a little. It would probably hurt, and I’d have to be very careful to do a full reset afterward to get all of the beta radiation and slow protons, as well as the sheerly poisonous chemical damage out of my body, but I could feel everything I needed… from spare carbon and iron to copper, silicon, and even traces of gold, silver, and some uranium. Phosphorous, fluorine, arsenic… all sheer poison, but exactly the building blocks I needed for construction, laced with the energy I probably needed to become more powerful.

“There?” Candace asked skeptically, “Down there? That stuff is… like four hundred feet down, and there’s a respirator outlet and sealer wall there to keep the gasses down. You just want to trot down there, magic down the sealer, and sit in the old pits, where they stuffed mine tailings and toxic waste for over a hundred years before this place was reclaimed?”

I shook my head, “Of course not. I want the materials and the radiation. The poison down there would kill me in seconds. I want a good, solid hazard suit with a self-contained oxygen supply so I don’t have to filter it so much, a hazmat bath and decontamination system, and THEN I want to sit down there in the toxic waste and mine tailings.”

“And you really think you will be safe?”

I grinned, “Not even slightly. I hope I will be safe. I am sure that with your powers, you prefer to sit someplace with clean winds and healthy sun and rain. I like that too, but I am thinking I can absorb more energy from here.”

“Hoping? Isn’t that kind of a big risk?”

I nodded, “Yeah, but right now I can drain off the ionized radiation that’s seeping through. If it’s too much, I won’t break the seal. So what did she offer you?”

She looked nervous, “Umm, personal training, which is awesome since she has a similar powerset and decades of experience, and extra teamwork credits.”

“The cheat! That’s practically blackmail!”

She shrugged and then stretched, and I tried not to notice that the motion almost showed underboob. I was paranoid, not dead. “So does that mean I am in? Now that you know I have a very personal reason to keep you safe in a team and play a good anchor?”

I sighed, “You know I have to talk to Mindy about this.”

She smiled slightly, “I let Mommy know what was going on before she ever knocked on your door. Did you know that she’s convinced that you are a liar?”

“Did she tell you that?”

She shrugged, “Not in so many words, but she did tell me she thought you were some Diablo guy that you said you weren’t.”

I sighed, “Let’s just say I haven’t had a chance to come clean yet, even though it’s kind of pointless since I am now officially teamed up with a girl who has probably inspected every inch of my life since the day I was born. The answer is yes, I did lie to her to protect myself at first, but it’s rapidly becoming apparent that I am going to have to come up with an alternative method of ensuring my own safety.”

“Isn’t that what my job is now?”

I looked at her very seriously, and then asked her, “Is it?”