“Secret Identities are a myth. They are a useful myth, but they are still a myth. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they mean anything.” Droned Professor Pendrake, our Game Theory teacher. I knew this already, but game theory turned out to be the strategy and tactics involved with being a superpowered individual in the real world rather than a comic book.
“Some supervillains, and a lot of street vigilantes, the ones that might not have any powers at all, can maintain a secret identity, but they accomplish this by being absolute introverts, and by that behavior alone they usually imply that they lead a double life.”
“But in the real world, even with a holomask, it’s not impossible for someone with decent research skills to determine your real identity. But there are powerful customs involved. If you bust a crime boss, he is very unlikely to come after your family, because he knows damned well that if he targets a hero or the hero’s family from the inside, a standard prison is absurdly simple for a vengeance-seeking Alpha to penetrate. They also have their own families, and history has proven again and again that even the most heroic alpha, when triggered by rage and grief, will usually set aside her imposed morality to redress a wrong in the most violent possible way.”
“Even supervillains profit from this set of written and unwritten rules. While it’s an old game for nemesis to meet as civilians and snipe and snark at each other, you don’t bust a cowl out of costume, and they don’t attack you when you are getting pizza with your baseline boyfriend, because out of costume doesn’t mean out of power.”
“This does not, of course, hold true for the police department. If they have evidence that some girl… or guy, is actually a crook with a link to their face, they have every right to bust you. That’s one reason breaking the law frequently in costume is a stupid idea. Also, certain crimes demand a response, costume or not.”
He paused and looked around the class like this part was especially important. “One thing to remember is that appearances do not make the crime. That’s why you have support and police links. If you see someone moving a television into a truck, they might be a criminal… or they might be helping their friend move. A scary guy winging his way around the city at midnight might look like a villain, or he might be a vigilante, or even a baseline trying out his new set of tech wings.”
“In the comic books, you see heroes patrolling the city. Most of you who go into emergency response work, or join a city team, will never, ever go on patrol. Why? Because that is the cop’s job. We keep watch, but we do NOT replace the police department under any circumstances. Purse snatchers, robberies, even violent crimes are THEIR jurisdiction, not ours.”
“If you are walking by a rape, you will get involved, but remember that in the end, we are all civilians. Our arrests are citizen’s arrests, and even those of us employed by the police or military are civilian contractors. You are a civilian that is armed with a dangerous weapon, your alpha abilities, so make sure your ass is covered.”
He coughed a little, “That’s where the secret identity thing comes into play. It won’t protect you if you commit a felony, you are going to be recognized. Most capes and cowls wind up knowing each other or can obtain each other’s identities, so as Patrick Swayze said, be nice. If things get violent, then get violent, break limbs, whatever, but when someone surrenders, that’s not a good time to start beating his or her ass as punishment.”
He sighed. “You are not the punishment, you are the crowbar or the threat. Except in very special circumstances, you never take the mantle of punishment or executioner. This is not some sort of morality argument, it’s not about trying to take away your edge or an appeal against corporal punishment, it’s the fact that while you might be anonymous enough to have a date or go shopping without being pestered for autographs if you make a habit of playing punisher, it WILL catch up with you.”
“Stay safe, stay educated, and remember to keep your team in the loop. Even if you are a solo, you are still going to need a support structure, someone to let you know when that guy in the bug costume is a legitimate threat, a vigilante that should be left alone, a mentally unstable individual who needs to be brought into a safe policed environment, or just a baseline playing out a sexual fantasy with his alpha girlfriend.”
He glanced at his watch, “On that note, by Wednesday each of you needs to read chapter Thirteen of Markis’ ‘Donning the Mask’. Write me a few paragraphs, in your own words and not AI-written, explaining the chapter’s thrust and the morale effects of creating a power vacuum when removing an organized local criminal presence will do more harm than good. See you Wednesday.”
Ugh, I was all too aware of the problems he discussed, considering the role that playing the supervillain for over a year added to my education. I was always the Johnny-come-lately since there was no way I’d spend the time building a local underworld presence when it was doomed to come crashing down when the hero attacked, but I could understand the effects.
Professor Pendrake’s lecture was surprisingly enlightening, despite his poor delivery, but that was probably because he spent twenty-five years working as a strategic analyst and eventually leading Toronto’s armored defense league. He was one of the reasons I refused to dismiss baseline contributions, since without his brilliant tactics and creative use of the Frostbear Kaiju, Toronto would probably have fallen to the psycho-squid monster wave six years ago, alphas or no alphas.
As I stood, So did most of my team. Like most teams, we were encouraged to take our classes together if they applied, and while Sabrina was still getting placement testing, I suspected she would be here in a day or two… It wasn’t even a week into the new semester, and things were moving fast. Candace had already passed this course last year, but over a day, I usually had a class with at least three of my teammates at any one time.
It was a little gratifying to be surrounded by lovely women who actually wanted to be around you, and Candace and Sabrina had argued politely about it. Sabrina stated that the effect that essence refinement had on a body naturally increased your charisma, erased physical defects, and just naturally made a cultivator more attractive as they gained power.
Candace, on the other hand, argued that it was a feedback effect of female psychology, seeing a guy surrounded by top-shelf women, plus my confidence and drive, tended to make other women desire what was a superior male, in some kind of power play.
I had no idea, I just knew that even though the amount of attention I was getting made me vaguely uncomfortable, especially when girls from outside of the team seemed to go out of their way to try and make themselves more appealing around me, it also kinda stroked my ego, and let me mentally flip Crystal the bird.
I was training in the tunnel last night, with Sabrina watching from the windowed enclosure of the tunnel’s airlock and decontamination seal and offering advice through the mounted comm speaker, when she brought it up. The rest of the team had been surprisingly eager to have a booster as our final teammate, even if it was as a secondary power support rather than a fifth combatant.
“You know that any of the team you have assembled would dive into your bed in a heartbeat if you let them think that they had a chance. Some of them would even happily share.”
I snorted, mixing some classic acrobatics freestyle exercises with an Aikido kata. I’d brought in some weights and a hanging bar I’d mounted in the tunnel because doing full essence circulation and draw while working out hard was an important part of body tempering. My chosen method of meditation was a huge boon for body refinement cultivation, and each time I worked out in the tunnel I could feel the density of my muscles increasing, my reflexes speeding, my muscle control increasing along with my wind, and even my senses sharpening. It was creepy, but the essence I was forcing to flow through my body was having a much greater, preternatural effect on my physical development I couldn’t have anticipated.
Of course, it helped that my energy absorption was also proceeding apace. The speed with which I could drain the radiation fields was growing along with the size of my energy pool. My helmet display read over two thousand essence and growing, and I was still far from filling my entire dantian-thing to the point where I would need to start compressing my chi. It was getting to the point where I could clean the entire tunnel of almost all but trace energy, and if this kept up for much longer, I’d probably start burning off some energy converting the active toxins and moving the entire rig farther down the tunnel towards the pile as my mere presence cleaned out the waste.
“Including you?” I asked, chuckling as I practiced a full-stretch high kick. It wasn’t a thing I was stupid enough to use in a real fight. I mean, it looked cool, but it also gave your enemy a nice, clean shot at your crotch, but it dramatically increased your limberness and flexibility if you could pull it off, and I could.
“Especially me,” she said, shocking me enough that I lost the stretch, and had to recover quickly into the next kata. “What? Why?”
She chuckled a little. “Several reasons. First, you are handsome. Lots of cultivators are handsome, it sort of comes with the territory, but even as a pure mortal you were tall, good-looking, and took great care of your body. That makes a huge difference for a body cultivator, and it also shows discipline, self-control, and focus. You are nice to the girls around you, even if it’s clear you still don’t trust them, not even Mindy. Shall I go on?”
I did a scissor backflip. I wasn’t showing off, I just honestly had seldom seen it accomplished even in movies without wire assistance, but as my reflexes and coordination increased, it became… easy. Street dancers back before the FAAFO had done it as part of their break-dancing thing, but if I had tried this last week I would probably have given break-dancing entirely new meaning as I hit the floor.
“Yes. I need to know where I need to start adding in disgusting comments or gestures to blow off some of the attention.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
She chortled again. I kinda liked that she wasn’t a giggler, and while her voice was not quite as deep as Chinook’s, it wasn’t almost too shrill like Akyo’s when she got excited. Akyo WAS a giggler, and apparently, her shrillness and giggling were trained, something she called Kawaii. While men where she came from might have found it beautiful, for me the forced gestures and responses just felt fake, childish, and irritating when it got to be too much. I liked women, not little girls.
“You don’t act like you are immune to the interest, but you also don’t go overboard with sexuality like a lot of guys in your position would. You are like that cute gay friend that socialites wish they had in their friend circle, but you aren’t gay.”
She coughed a little, “Mindy is convinced you are a bad boy for some reason, Akyo probably has a western man kink, which isn’t uncommon for girls where she is from, Candace is just horny and repressed and you are almost available, and Abigail looks at you like you are the answer to her dreams, I don’t know why.”
“And you?” I asked, switching over to doing handstand pushups. With the muscle development from cycling and exercise, regular push-ups just weren’t doing it anymore, and I was tempted to get the belt, bracelets, and anklets that were super-heavy just to get a burn.
“Me? I like your subdued sense of humor, lack of the overweening arrogance that your unique position could encourage, and the fact that you are a sea of stability, a rock I could rest on that will resist the tides. That and I’ve seen you naked.”
I sighed, “Everyone has apparently seen me naked,” I stated, glad that this time, at least, I was wearing my costume.
“It seems like it. At least your team and a few others did. Something about getting powerdrunk and wandering around the input dorms in your birthday suit. But the build you developed before you ever awakened has had amazing effects on your current physique, enough so that I wonder if starting body refinement before puberty might be a mistake for dual-path cultivators, at least for the males, who have a higher tolerance for muscle and nerve enhancement.”
“Usually a dual-path or body cultivator has a very compact and seriously cut body, but they don’t have the sheer definition and bulk that bodybuilding or weightlifting adds. By starting late, after you built yourself as a mortal, your body cultivation path might be considerably more productive in the long run. It might not matter much if you ever advance to gold-core or nascent soul, but then again, it might also matter a great deal, since it adds to your already impressive foundation.”
I looked back at my butt. “My foundation is not that impressive.” I wasn’t getting energy through special breathing since my air was filtered, but just circulating my essence through my body seemed to be helping to build it up from both my natural absorption and intentionally stripping the radiation of its energy. Supposedly, if I advanced far enough, I could just absorb energy directly through my skin and then purify it, leading to much greater energy absorption, but that was probably a long way off. I just sort of wished that I had a way to measure the energy, store it, and release it into controlled bursts that helped me develop intentionally rather than simply unguided absorption, but I had no idea where to start.
She laughed, “Not your butt, your power foundation. Everything you have, from your conditioning to your power techniques, your soul space to your dantian, even your psychology, bloodline, and cultivation roots, contributes to your foundation, and then eventually your soul cauldron.”
“So what does dual-path mean, is it like dual cultivation?”
“No… dual cultivation is what happens when a man and a woman cultivate using sex as their meditation medium. It’s a powerful technique, but it ties cultivators together, spiritually. Unless one of the partners is using the other as a cultivation vessel, where they use the dual cultivation as a way to increase and then suck out the other person’s cultivation base.”
“That sounds like rape.”
“It IS rape, even if it’s willing. At its best, the cultivation vessel is left without any foundation and has to be rebuilt from scratch. At its worst, it sucks out their potential, maybe even their life or soul, leaving them as a mindless husk or straight-up killing them.”
“And that’s demonic cultivation?”
She laughed, “No, Demonic cultivation isn’t a technique or a method, it’s the name assigned by righteous sects to any cultivation method that isn’t shrouded by secrecy and shielded by oaths of loyalty and behavior. It has a huge variety of methods, most of which are freely available to anyone who tries to learn them.”
“Of course, a lot of them are unethical if used, just like a lot of behaviors, but demonic cultivation is more of a political label, and those unethical methods being available gives them the excuse they need to shut down and destroy anyone that gains power without swearing to a sect, academy, or lord. The only real exception is alchemy because it’s used by everyone and very rare, but if anything, alchemy guilds and academies are even more secretive about their knowledge.”
I nodded, “And my method?”
She smiles, “I can’t use your method, but if it was freely distributed by the Serenoids, it would be labeled demonic instantly. Serenoids ARE demons after all. Demon is a… different term. What it really means is ‘outsider’, not particularly like the Christian definition of satanic or evil.”
“But your method, as it currently exists, contains both energy-drain components as well as atmospheric gathering techniques… well, since it seems to be something only you understand and can practice, and you haven’t made it freely available, might potentially be added as one of the righteous schools… if you built a powerful sect around it and used it for political maneuvers. What would you call it?”
I thought about it as I switched directly to some physical judo exercises I was working on perfecting. “Umm… the Jacob method?”
“No…” I heard the slightly tinny voice from the speaker. “If you create a method, or combine methods into a whole, it needs a grandiose name, like the seven circle heaven-hell energy gathering method, or Jacob’s phoenix foundation earth cycling toxic conversion method.”
I thought about it for a second, “I am not real good at coming up with grandiose names. I mean, the individual techniques seem to have natural names, but some of them are straight-up copies and adaptations that already have names, I just don’t know them, like the umm… four limbs radiation momentum retrieval technique, or maybe some sort of term for stripping toxins and using the bits that are useful while throwing the rest away.”
“Ah, you are right, that’s terrible. And you want to avoid adding the word toxin anywhere into it because that resembles gu techniques, which are pretty awful forms of demonic cultivation.”
“What’s gu?”
She sighed deeply, “Technically it’s considered one of the alchemy techniques, but it involves filling a jar with venomous and powerful essence-infused insects, letting them fight it out until only one survives, and keep adding bugs to the jar until the most powerful one remains, the Gu toxic spirit. Then you… uhh… invite it to inhabit your body. It burrows in, adds to your cultivation and power, especially with toxins, but drains and partially possesses you in doing so. Gu ascension involves becoming a hybrid of both forms, and the techniques they use for gathering power can be disgusting and horrifying, like laying larvae in a cultivation vessel and gaining power from the horde of your offspring.”
“Usually the survivor is one of several kinds of centipede, beetle, wasp, or mantis abominations, but occasionally it’s a spider spirit… spider spirits are the LEAST disgusting ones.”
I nodded, “Right. Avoid toxic bugs. I probably would anyway, since heavy metal poisons are easy to work with, but biological toxins are usually nightmarish organic molecules.”
She laughed, “As an alchemist, I can confirm that. How’s your energy levels? Are you ready to start trying to extend your power aura?”
I nodded, “Looking good. I feel full, and my meter is reading twenty-five hundred. I have almost as much energy as most class two alphas, which is a huge improvement. Want to see something really weird?”
“Weird how? Are you going to strip naked again?”
I shook my head, “Nope, I was going to show you why Mindy thinks of me as a bad boy.”
“Please do.”
There wasn’t much moisture down here, so I couldn’t freeze the ambient liquid to create icicles without intentionally converting a huge amount of atmospheric hydrogen and oxygen into water, but I was able to freeze a large area of toxic chemical fumes and send it down to impact one of the tunnel’s walls. After a moment, I shot a handmade fireball, fueled by those very same fumes, into the frosty patch, igniting it in a rush of flames, before I sucked the heat energy out of the plasma and made it vanish.
A moment later, I cleared a tunnel of air with actively conducting electrons to create a giant forked lightning burst, which I intentionally maintained for almost half a second in a stable burst to increase its impressiveness, and then added a set of photons to the mix, while simultaneously creating a kinetically-active patch of air underneath me to make me hover in the air while I did it. At the end, I tacked on a nice bunch of random kinetic motion to the lightshow to carve out and flatten a chunk of the wall in a burst of noise.
I kinetically deflected the debris that scattered back in my direction and added a scattering photon burst into the mix to make the orb I was kinetically controlling clearly visible with a sparkle where each of the thousands of impacts occurred. Then, I slowly settled it back down and set my feet back on the floor.
I was pleased to note that the magic act had only burned about fifty energy, which I quickly recovered, and that I’d managed to maintain my circulation almost effortlessly the entire time. It was a display that could have easily classified as a class three alpha for EACH of the several different special effects, but now, if Linker had classified me as a class six after that? I would totally have believed him.
Versatile, variable, and overlapping powers could be a ton more destructive than a single form of energy, and even if I couldn’t unlink molecular chains to cause matter to disperse, I could have dropped it to absolute zero and then immediately raised its temperature to thousands of degrees to allow natural molecular dissolution to occur… I had options, and the temperature stuff could be started in my aura and then projected in a way that molecular dispersion couldn’t.
“That was… impressive. Were those all techniques?”
I shook my head, “I guess the lightning could be considered a separate technique, but the bubble and floating were variations of the same technique, and the cold and fire were the same thing just at different ends of the scale.”
“Oh, and by the way, your armor, the one that matches the rest of the team, is already ready… it took me about a fifth of my energy to create it after your little acupuncture demonstration, whereas before it would have taken me weeks of constant effort and exhaustion. Go ahead and head out, I am going to need the decontam chamber.”
After I steam-showered my armor and made sure that it wasn’t carrying any toxic or radioactive guests, I stepped out of the shower and took my helmet off. Technically I could have done it myself, now, but it saved energy and made the school’s faculty feel better when I used their safety procedures.
“So what are you planning to do?”
I looked at Sabrina curiously, “Get some food, get a shower, read our assignment, and then go to bed.”
She shook her head, “I meant about the girls.”
I scratched my head, “Get some food, get a shower, read our assignment, and then go to bed. Classes start early tomorrow. I am not planning to do anything. Maybe someday I will, but it won’t likely be with an alpha. You should be happy.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, as you said, alphas are using some sort of corrupting chaos energy. I swore off alpha girls a while back, for good reasons, and now I just have a better reason.” With that, I kept my own council and we headed back towards the suite.