“What was that?” I asked as Abbey walked with me back to the dorms.
She looked at me oddly, and then shrugged, “I am not good with the ranting like she is, but that was… a long time coming.”
“Huh?”
“She’s right. Look. You really are the team leader. You are almost as strong now as Chinook, really stupidly fast, and you are better at fighting than just about anyone else in the team, but you keep holding back like some evil mastermind expecting your minions to do it all. I think the gold bar was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“How so?”
She sighed, “She’s your sponsor, and like the rest of us, she’s more than halfway in love with you. Heck, Terracotta keeps looking at you like she’s desperately hoping you ask her to stay instead of going back to Japan, and she would if you asked. But Frostweaver is your sponsor, and you know she has financial problems of her own… she’s been desperately struggling for ways to get you the support you and the team need like you are this penniless bum, and every time you blow off a payday it just makes it that much harder to try and balance it for you.”
“And then you hand her a bar of gold like it’s nothing and then say you don’t care about getting paid for the long hours and hard work you did making those armors for the Phoenix team. Everything she is trying to do is pointless. You keep throwing these responsibilities, dealing with fame, notoriety, and money off on her, and it’s killing her.”
“Plus you keep moping about Crystal and your dad’s company and using it as an excuse to ignore your friends. We all have a pretty good idea of what you are capable of, but you keep insisting you are not a hero. I get that you don’t want to do the whole fighting villains thing, and I don’t either, but you turn around and freely admit that if we have a Kaiju incursion you’d be right there, and according to Sabrina you had no problems fighting them at all, and so we are just like… what the heck?”
She shook her head, “Talk about mixed signals. I know you work hard, but to the rest of us it looks like things keep getting handed to you on a silver plate and you keep pushing them away and then beating yourself up about never getting anything.”
I sighed, “Are you going to give me advice and then yell at me?”
She laughed, “No. Unlike you, I am kind of an introvert, although I try my hardest to be sparkly and bubbly. I know that I am never going to get what I really want and that my gifts aren’t really combat-oriented, so I have already resigned myself to the fact that someday I am just going to disappear into some corporate, military, or law enforcement information network. I could give you advice, but it would be real advice, not an excuse to vent. Are you going to eat that cookie?”
I handed her the cookies I had bought at the fair, and chuckled, “No, I was just trying to be sweet. Not a huge fan of cookies.”
She nodded and bit into one, chewing thoughtfully before swallowing and saying, “My advice would be a bit like hers. I will find you a better coder, or get around Kate to get to Quiet Code if you want. Let her work out the coding issues in her team’s suits, and then sell ‘em for a million a pop as a way to back her off from ‘potential girlfriend’ to ‘customer’. If Kate decides to haggle, let her know that future suits will be five mil and she’s getting the friends and family discount.”
I nodded slowly, “Yeah, that could fix a couple of problems. Any more sage advice?”
She nodded, “If you want it. That power-boosting thing? You said it only works with people who have similar powers to yours. Find out how similar it has to be… I mean, Frostweaver might work, Chinook might work, and even Terracotta might work, since her power is about kinetically manipulating earth rather than just creating it, right?”
“It is intimate… That’s why I am having problems with Kate.”
She smiled a little evilly, “So try it with Akyo. She’s quiet about it since that’s sort of an accepted meme for the role she's trying to play here at the academy, but she has a lot more background in that sort of stuff since it’s a solid part of her cultural mythology, she’s just been waiting for you to ask her instead of leaning on the alchemist. Not to mention, you haven’t asked me either, at least not for anything more than information on the Serenoids.”
I looked at her oddly, “I thought that Japan and China were like… traditional enemies and stuff. And what do you mean by the role she's trying to play?”
She shrugged, “They are, sort of, but their mythology has been swapped back and forth so much that it’s more like two brothers beating each other up. They have both done horrible things to each other in the past, but it’s those cultural similarities that cause such huge friction. Not to mention, if it does get too intimate, let’s just say that I am pretty sure that she’s desperately hoping that her quiet contrast with Candace will be the key to winning your affection.”
“You are kind of giving away girl secrets, you know.”
She nodded, “Information manipulator and light illusionist. I should probably be charging you for useful rumors. I know you gained power from both that Serenoid stuff and what Sabrina told you, but you need to remember that in the end, they are aliens. You are human. Maybe those Asian myths have a lot better foundation for us humans than some weird four-armed aliens.”
“Sabrina is human.”
She nodded, “I know, but her power is all about enchanting substances and then consuming them. You don’t do that. Not that what she does won’t be useful to any of us, they might be incredibly helpful, but she does NOT use the power the same way that you or any of the rest of us do, and has zero training in it… she admittedly flatly that she only knows a little about how uhh… righteous cultivators do what they do because she has a different path. What little she knows is all about either alchemy, or the demonic cultivators that she was forced to deal with, and she even said that the whole point behind blood cultivation was to steal the power of other creatures to make up for the fact that they don’t have any power of their own. You have power.”
“That’s deep.”
She smiled at me winsomely. “Of course it is. Chinook’s strategy is to be a blunt instrument until you give in, and Akyo’s strategy is to be a quiet and appealing counterpoint. My strategy is to make myself so essential that you wouldn’t even think about not making me part of whatever team you build. I am not sure what Mindy’s strategy is, but I know she has one, and Sabrina is just trying to survive.”
“You make this whole thing sound like some kind of harem.”
She shrugged, “It often sort of winds up that way. With sheer supply and demand, male alphas tend to have all the power in relationships. I think that’s one of the reasons why the term alpha won out over all the alternatives since most alphas are physically idealized. It helps that if a girl doesn’t want to play power politics with alphas, well, there are tons of normie guys out there. She can cut herself out of the play and just settle for second best… but as you probably know already, no one likes to settle for second best.”
“What about…” I started, but she cut me off. “We aren’t talking about homosexuals. Their game is very different, and you wouldn’t believe how much it overlaps, but it’s complicated and tied in with all sorts of emotional, cultural, and upraising stuff. Let’s just say that for some reason, while more than a few Alphas are bisexual, not many of them pitch exclusively for their own team, especially the men.”
She shrugged, “But about the other thing… face it, you have gotten into a habit of being a bigot.”
I was a little offended, “No, I’m not. I don’t care about that kind of thing.”
She shook her head, “That’s why I said it’s a habit. You paint every alpha girl with the same brush because of Crystal. I don’t think it’s because she broke your heart, but rather because you assume that a girl with power is automatically a traitor. You do the same thing with wealth and power… your cousin did you wrong, so anyone with power or money is automatically evil and greedy or else they would be broke, including yourself.”
“That was kinda reinforced by the Maxwells because they have money and power and don’t hesitate to use it for morally objectionable reasons. But in the end, people are people, they can be good or evil, and power and money just give them a greater reach. That’s the problem that a lot of cops deal with also, they deal day in and day out with the worst scum, and so they just… automatically assume that anyone they deal with is scum just because they have to deal with them,” she added.
“So now I am a burnt-out cop?”
She shrugged, “Yes and no. At least they are usually trained to recognize it. You aren’t. Later-year courses train you to deal with that kind of thing because people on the hero track have to worry about the same kind of burnout. I'm not going to be as harsh as Mindy was, because I understand where you are coming from, but she probably fell for you the first time she met you and has been struggling with it the whole time. Don’t laugh, but among alphas love at first sight is a real thing. Power calls to power.”
I thought about that as we took the elevator up to our suite. That would explain why she was so incredibly grateful after our first duel, and why she almost instantly agreed to help sponsor me. Ugh. Emotions and drama were so complicated. I sighed. “Okay, so I am going to make a leadership call right now.”
“Oh?”
I nodded, “Yeah. You can actually get to the rest of the Phoenix team. Find a way to let them know that I have their suits, the price I expect, and the fact that I need to meet with Quiet Code and that her help will be part of the costs. The duel was a draw, so if they don’t like it, fuck ‘em. Four mil and forty hours of her labor.”
She wiggled, “Ooh, playing the powerful now. I like it. Is our date still on?”
I nodded, “Yes, but it might take a little time. You are right about Akyo too. I need some alone time with her.”
She laughed, “Right, so my new job is personal secretary.”
“Sure, is that a problem?”
She shook her head, “Not at all. It’s what I do best. And it’s halfway to making me indispensable. We can talk pay later, and it will let me take some of the pressure off of Mindy.”
I nodded, “Thanks. I guess I need to play team organizer now. Also, if you can I want to lean on Candace a little more for physical training. She’s a lot more…”
“Drill sergeant?”
I nodded, “Exactly. I am not comfortable with that role when it comes to you and Akyo. I mean, I know she looks big and brutal when she forms, but I am a little overprotective. Inside all that armor and stone is this fragile little thing.”
She snorted, “That fragile little thing is damned near bulletproof even without her armor. You maybe don’t realize it, but she’s been clocked at over two thousand pounds max lift. If she were fragile like me, she would be a ranged player instead of a tanker, and I am pretty sure that in her new armor, she could take harder hits than you could.”
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
I laughed, “She probably can. You don’t become an armored brick if you can’t take a hit inside your armor. Still, if we have three tanks and she can play ranged instead, we might need to train a little for alternatives… my ranged game is total crap against heavies.”
I smiled, “Thanks Abbey. I need to do some thinking. To be honest, Mindy gave me a lot to think about. I don’t think she’s totally right, but she’s not totally wrong either.”
***
The equipment for working out in the Dorm’s gym was different. There was a lot of super-strength going around since physical enhancement was the most common secondary trait, but at first, I was disappointed.
When I did burnout deadlifts using the super-strength lift gear, and spring-torsion equipment that could handle lifts in the tons, I capped out at nine hundred and twenty. I mean, before my body refinement, when I was using my powers to alter my muscle density, I was capped at almost a thousand pounds.
And then I realized, that the equipment wasn’t set for pounds, it was set to kilograms! My disappointment shifted to elation when I realized, with a quick conversion in my head, that my deadlift was now just over two thousand pounds. The best part was, that as my body refinement improved, that cap should keep going up as well. I was inspired by the realization and threw myself into a set of burnouts that blew away the workouts I had done before.
Max lift over two thousand pounds. Maximum speed without cheating, sixty-seven miles per hour. Even my nerve conduction velocity, the speed at which your brain transfers electrical impulses through your nervous system, was running at over two hundred meters per second, which was superhuman. It couldn’t hold a candle to Akyo or Candace, their max lifts could be measured in tons, but for someone who didn’t have a physical power gift, it was phenomenal.
While I was running on the treadmill, trying to figure out how far my long-term endurance had improved, I saw Abbey come back into the empty gym. Usually, it was sort of full, but the events of the fair had probably distracted most of the dorm.
Usually, the way she watched me as I worked out would have been disconcerting, but dangit, she was a hot little bundle. I tried not to show off, but I was well aware that I probably looked pretty decent in my shorts and tank tee, even if I was overly sweaty from the burnouts.
After a few minutes, I reset the treadmill so I slowed to a run, rather than the sprinting I’d been doing, and turned to ask her a little breathlessly, “Having fun?”
Abbey blushed brightly, but nodded, her favorite tablet tucked up against her chest. “Yes. I umm… talked to Mindy and told her you had agreed to let me take over financial, scheduling, and correspondence as your secretary. Oh, and I expect you to pay me, too.”
“How did she react? Was she mad?”
She shook her head vigorously enough to toss her hair, “Oh God, no. She gave me a big smile and said thank you. I didn’t realize just how much she was dealing with. You asked her to keep your correspondence clear, and she had over twenty-five hundred blitmails stored in your school inbox.”
I was staggered and slowed down the treadmill more for a cool-off jog. “Twenty-five hundred?”
She nodded, “Yeah. You probably didn’t realize it, but she isn’t a data manipulator like me. I could go through it quickly, but she had to read every single one. Stack onto her course load, plus the fact that she has to deal with her own stuff, she's stupidly overworked. I can kinda see why she was stressed out enough to explode.”
“Is that going to overload you?”
She laughed, “not even slightly. That’s sort of my superpower. I already screened out all the spam, and all the crap like marriage offers just because you are a male alpha. There’s still a lot I need your input on to screen, but I cut it down to about a quarter of that just because I know you aren’t interested in visiting someplace like Seattle to get laid, and you don’t seem to be interested in contributing to a fertility clinic. Unless I was wrong?”
I shook my head, “Nope, totally right. Thanks.”
She nodded and was wearing something that I guess looked like a secretary’s outfit, a cute white blouse with a ruffle around her surprisingly ample cleavage, and a pair of soft-looking slacks and short heels. The outfit looked good on her, and with the glasses, she was leaning heavily on the cute librarian look.
“Okay, so here’s the deal. First off, I changed your class schedule slightly. The AI and programming logic? With your memory, it’s a total waste of time, especially since you have mentioned several times that you prefer working with hardware logic. I have a list of books for you to memorize that will cover that, and you don’t need it for a cover career in logistics.”
“Instead, you will be taking the same team leadership course that Mindy’s taking, because you need it as much or more than she does. They probably would have pushed for it next year, but you need it now.”
I looked at her sourly, “Thanks.”
She beamed, “You are welcome. Honestly, I think you will like it because it dovetails nicely with what you were trying to accomplish before, but it’s a little more… proactive. Do you want to help your team? This is how.”
“In addition, I upgraded your radiology and materials lab. You probably know more about how radiation works than most of the course instructors, so you should enjoy playing with the big boys, although you might get asked to play teacher’s aid next year.”
I nodded, and stopped the machine, finally, hopping off. “That should come in handy. I have almost drained the old dump, but I still have a ways to go in compressing my energy. Hopefully, the lab will help.”
She nodded, “There was a bit of conflict, but umm… I sort of got around it.”
“How?”
She sighed, “Well, your official designation was fallback support, so I changed it?”
I looked at her in surprise, “You changed it? To what?”
She looked a little embarrassed, “Active support, Intellect.” She shrugged, “I mean, your healing and abilities are actually close combat support, and your power is weird and shifty, without any training templates, so basically you are registered as a supermind. I know it’s not technically correct, but it opens up a lot more interesting course options later that you can probably use better, as well as possible early internships.”
I shrugged, “I think you are right, though.”
“Right? How?”
I grinned, “It involves something that you might want to keep under your hat. I am pretty sure that it’s well-known in the power investigative circles, and it’s definitely part of the old legends, but they probably don’t share it with first-years. It’s about the way powers work.”
She looked excited and sat on one of the empty weight benches as I moved to the leg press machine. “Gimme gimme!”
I nodded, “Well, you know how I kept saying my power was microkinesis? Well, it’s not. It turns out there’s a lot more to the way a power works than is commonly understood.” I started doing leg presses, damn… thirteen hundred kilos. No wonder the machine had hand grips.
“Basically, every human in existence, even the ones that never become an alpha, have a certain affinity. The affinities are weird, though. They can be something conceptual, or something literal, but there’s a huge number of them.”
“That’s why when girls get two powers, they are often complementary. Because if they have, say, an affinity for heat, even if they get two wildly different abilities, like speed and physical enhancements, they will both gain the same theme from their affinity. So you would be left with someone who bursts into flames, can consume fuel to improve their physical abilities, and uses directed heat to add to their speed. That overlap can even look a lot like a third power like that heat-based speedster might be able to fly incredibly fast because of the way their affinity interacts with their basic abilities.”
She looked very interested, so I continued. “My actual power is my focus. My mind’s ability to memorize trillions of locations instantly, and focus on each of those locations. But I instinctively used my affinity with that focus, and my affinity is momentum. So when you combine the two, I am able to change the momentum, speed, kinetic energy, and location of things. I don’t actually have telekinesis, which is why I can only affect very tiny objects, trillions of them at a time.”
“So what do you think my actual combination might be?” she asked.
I started pressing hard. “I can’t be sure, not unless I do that power enhancement thing with you, but it has a negative side effect if I do. But I suspect that the actual list of powers is a whole lot smaller than everyone assumes, but the broad variety of potential affinities is what makes it look like almost every power is unique.”
“I suspect that you have a mental ability similar to mine, but your affinity is something like light, appearance, or vision. So you have focus, and alter, modified by appearance and that can be shuffled around and manipulated.”
She looked thoughtful but then shook her head. “That would explain a lot of it, but how do I change or copy mental stuff?”
I grinned, “Can you pull a smell out of my head?”
She shook her head, “No, I can’t change smells, just surface appearances and data.”
I nodded, “That’s because when you mess with a memory, you are messing with the memory of an appearance. It might be more like perception or optics.”
She sighed, “If that is the way powers work, then you might be onto something completely new. I have read a LOT about powers, and have never heard of a secondary factor like affinity yet. This might be valuable or new information. If it pans out, you might have your original energy manipulation thesis a lot earlier than your fourth year. So...what drawbacks are you talking about?”
I sighed, pressing hard one more time and holding it, then slowly retracting my legs before settling them down. “This part is going to require you to promise to keep it secret because it’s very bad.”
“I promise to keep what you tell me here secret.”
I nodded slowly. This was critical stuff, and I still didn’t know how to share it in a way that wouldn’t cause any of many different reactions. Real nutjobs would want to exploit it, and civilians might decide it was a good excuse to execute or banish every alpha in existence.
“Okay, you know about the rift, right?”
She nodded, and I started sponging myself off with a towel and cleaning up the chair. “The one caused by the Q-bombs and the source of alphas? I know that there are hints that it exists, but that no one knows where it is even if certain alphas have rarely caught a glimpse of it.”
I nodded, “Well, it’s a rift into a dimension of energy. Chaotic energy. It’s been spilling into this world, and that excess energy has a limitless number of affinities attached to it. That’s how alphas work. They take in that energy and their affinity, or essence pool, strips out all the affinities that don’t match theirs, ejects it, and gives them correctly-keyed energy to run their powers.”
“The problem is, the rest of what they eject is still out there. That’s why the Q-brane is interfering with radio waves, and the power keeps growing and increasing the number of alphas. They are sucking energy out of the rift, using what they need, and the rest just settles into the atmosphere. Sabrina called our planet a death world because eventually it’s supposed to tip over the balance and suck the entire planet into that energy rift.”
“How soon?”
I shrugged, “I have no idea. Five minutes from now, maybe a hundred years from now, but that’s where the problem comes in. If it works, and I am not promising you it will, it will sever your power from the flow of the rift.”
She looked at me skeptically, “You mean I become normal again?”
I shook my head, “No sweety, you were never normal. What it means is that you will have to learn new ways of obtaining the energy. There are some upshots like you begin to pressurize your energy and refine and purify your body, which will make you stronger, tougher, and faster, but in the beginning, it sort of sucks. According to Kate, anyway.”
“The other upshot is that you will be absorbing the chaotic energy flow instead of adding it when you recharge, but recharging will become a regular part of your schedule. That means you become a water purifier at the edge of the dam instead of a water pump working to overflow it.”
She nodded, and I think I was done, but after a moment she asked, “Okay, I am waiting.”
“For what?”
She smiled a little, “For the part where you tell me the downside.”
I scratched my head, “I thought I did. Kate was a solid class four. Now, after weeks of training, she’s still only about a class three, although she will probably get back there soon enough. You lose a huge amount of immediate power in exchange for slow growth.”
She laughed, “Did you mistake me for a combat alpha? I am only a class three because of my versatility. Losing power will what? make me have a lot of downtime between its uses? If the world still had a real global wireless information network, I might be losing a lot, but as it is? The only times I use my ability is for playing pranks like your tee-shirt, and when I am connected to the city or school hard network.”
“Wait, if I refine my body will I get all hard like some physical alphas? I sort of like being soft.”
“Soft?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes, blushing a little, “You know, like if you uhh… hugged me, would it be like hugging a rock?”
I held out my hand.
She took it, and inspected it, feeling the webbing between my finger and my thumb. I tried to pretend I didn’t notice, but damn, it had been years since I had let a girl touch me except in a fight. Good thing I was sitting down.
She looked at me and blushed again. Crap, I forgot that she could read my mental images, if not my actual thoughts or memories. “Maybe after our date.”
I pulled back my hand and she nodded, “So, I guess it doesn’t affect you that much physically, it just increases your durability, not your skin density.”
I nodded, “I think it’s more of a mystical effect rather than strictly physical. According to Sabrina, it’s what your body does to prepare for more power and advance. Like a role-playing game or something.”
She smiled, “In that case, I really want to try it with you. Becoming a net producer instead of a net consumer has an appeal. I am not sure why you think that’s dangerous knowledge, though… I mean, wouldn’t every alpha want to do that?”
I sighed, “Most of the good ones would. The nut bags would just think it was another way to destroy the world, and what do you think the military minds among non-alphas would do if they found out that almost every single alpha in existence was helping destroy the world every time they used their powers?”
Her eyes went wide, and I could tell she caught my mental image of what it would look like… I had way too fertile of an imagination sometimes.
“Oh.”