“Why are you here, Blueprint?” Doctor Juarez asked after my class. I had decided to go ahead and attend my classes on Friday, despite technically being excused, because I had a week’s worth of work to turn in. Besides, I enjoyed many of the classes, especially the labs.

“Oh, I decided to go ahead and attend. Honestly, it allows me to relax and focus on my education since the rest of my schedule is kind of hectic. It’s either this, or I go to the labs and work, or veg out on a couch and watch the idiot screen.”

He shook his head, “No, I mean, why are you HERE?” he said, emphasizing the last word.

“To increase my abilities with biorepair?”

He sighed, “Okay, bear in mind, there’s a good reason there are only three people in this class. Healers are not unheard of, but they are not common, either. I read your paper on hemoglobin and platelet repair in enhanced energy environments, and it made me realize something foundational… Your abilities do NOT work the way most healers do, which accelerate the body’s natural self-repair abilities or enhance native primal abilities like regeneration or your immune system.”

“This class is mainly concerned with teaching the appropriate biological functions to apply enhanced accelerated healing effects to encourage healing, and which functions to explicitly avoid to prevent negative repercussions like cancer, bone density mismatch, and other potential trauma results from misapplication of those energy functions.”

I nodded, right out of the syllabus. “Got it.”

He sighed. “You don’t do that. I mean, you obviously can, but your methods apply immediate reconstruction of cells and stuff like blood and platelets, plus you do cellular repair and allele reconstruction. Based on your papers, you understand the healing process completely, and with your memory and reconstruction abilities added to your ability to perceive the damage directly, the only thing you really need is a safe material source for the repair… you can use spare skin, extra hair, fat, or in some cases even carbon cellulose like wood, paper, or even meat or carb-heavy food. According to your ability report, you can even convert carbon directly from nitrogen in the air. So my question is, why are you here? This is not a premed course, you won’t gain a doctorate, all it’s really for is to ensure that those on the hero track with healing-assistance skills don’t kill people by mistake.”

I sighed, “Because, as I said, it’s necessary. To the monster hunter track.”

He shook his head, “NOTHING is necessary to the monster hunter track except the ability to kill monsters, which you have already proven. Frankly, the only courses you need certified, especially with your prior logistical courses, are the direct combat ones. Most people are here, at this academy, to increase their chances of getting on a good team, to make contacts, and to hopefully gain some fame with dueling to secure a better contract.”

I groaned to myself. It was about that damned video again, wasn't it? Jeez, assist with killing ONE greater Kaiju, one time, and everyone thinks you are a demigod.

“This school is not really about teaching anything except for preventing screw-ups, logistically, tactically, and strategically. The labs? Those are there to help you prove your abilities, and from what I understand your tinker skills are already well-proven, as are your medical skills. Hell, I am a quad doc, served as support for a team for ten years, and some of the stuff you know blows me away… unreproducible effects, except you can reproduce them. If you decide to publish, you'd probably be on every required reading list inside of a decade.”

“So what are you saying?”

He sighed. “What I am saying is that you are growing, and educating yourself, faster than any courses we could offer. You should test out of this and your other direct education courses, and work on the areas you have weaknesses, namely personal combat and the leadership track. You seem to be set on the monster hunter path, God only knows why, since most full monster hunters only wound up there because they were such screw-ups that they weren’t able to get on a team, or their powers were so weird that they didn’t fit anyplace else.”

“Test out?”

He nodded, “Yes. Test out. I looked up your schedule. This class is useless to you. Power exploitation doesn’t offer anything that applies to you, because you are one of the weird ones. The labs are… cute, a good way to make contacts and waste your time, but you already have access to some kind of lab facilities that suit your needs, and the advisors say that you don’t even bother to ask them any questions.”

“The only classes that make sense are teamwork, leadership, and physical and martial training. If you want, I will happily sign a certification for medical work, which is all you need since you aren’t going to become a medical doctor, and you don’t need power exploitation certification… your fight video is public knowledge, thank you, by the way.”

I sighed, “I still need to make social contacts for various reasons, and I have a team now that depends on me.”

He shook his head, “No they don’t. Network could test out any time she wants, and she doesn’t need it unless she decides, for some weird reason, to take a combat track she’s totally unsuited for. Frostweaver is exactly the kind of student we look for, so I hope she decides to stay the course, she has huge potential… but she’s already hot property due to her broad power base, competence, and to be fair, her connection with you. No one knows why Terracotta is here, since, despite our elite atmosphere, there are academies in Tokyo that are just as good, I figure she’s just here to make contacts. Sabrina is only taking labs and advanced biochemistry courses, and has an agenda that doesn’t involve joining any teams, and Chinook? She’s wasting her time here.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged, “Chinook is a solid class four. She has solo written all over her. She was in that video too, but her raw tactical talent is… lacking. Even if she gets to the top of the competition rankings, she has solo monster hunter written all over her, and needs real-world experience to get over the hump.”

I sighed, he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. Candace was not a studious type or a thinker, which was why even in a team she was better as a scout than an anchor. City teams, even the one back where she came from, wanted solid roles and thoughtful police types, and with her mix of physical and area-control abilities, she would be better off in a publicity team or solo defender, which meant solo monster hunter.

Of course, as a monster hunter, she would be absolutely ideal, and most likely one of the survivors. Movement, area control, defense, and solid combat skills? She would be in her element, especially since she had a survival background. But as he mentioned, the monster hunters had a nasty stigma because it was the last resort for fuck-ups, and often a death sentence for those that didn’t belong there or really, anywhere near a combat zone.

He sighed, “I am not a course counselor, but I had ten years on a feeder team and I have taught students even longer. I recognize potential. She is a scout through and through. She’ll probably ace the single tactical course without learning anything she doesn’t already know, individual logistics, and combat training. In year three, she will repeat the advanced teamwork courses, and utterly wash out of the leadership, forensic, and logistics avenues. She is not stupid, but some people just aren’t meant for city team roles. She doesn’t belong here either, and will wind up in the monster hunters thinking she’s a failure.”

I smiled slightly, I wasn’t as confident as he was, but I knew she was a good scout, and unlike the city teams, I had a need for a scout in my future. City teams needed intelligence assets, negotiators, law enforcement, and tactical thinkers, which she definitely wasn’t. I wondered if there was a way to tell her I wanted her on my team without making her feel like a failure.

But it was stupid to think of the monster hunters as washout lane. They probably had the most important job on Earth. And with the right attitude, a little success, and maybe some decent support from a good wingman, we could make the monster hunters into what it was meant to be, the home of the elite.

“Something amuses you?”

I nodded, “Yep. I will take you up on your offer, but I think I am going to put together a new kind of team. I am pretty sure we can get support, but tell me, what’s the most common cause of failure against a Kaiju wave?”

He thought about that. “Well, we always have some warning if there is a greater kaiju involved, they are not exactly subtle. Usually, it’s a case of a defense force not able to bring enough force to bear on the boss creature without letting the rest of the wave wreak havoc. There just isn’t enough local force of high enough ranks in addition to the lower-ranked defenders to do both at the same time. Unlike our most recent wave, most defenders can’t slaughter an entire wave before the leader even gets close to the walls, and while we do have warning, it’s rarely enough time to send more than a token group of high-speed and usually low offensive ability assistance from other cities or the monster hunters, who generally aren’t the cream of the crop to begin with.”

He sighed, “The lack of communication is what’s killing us, especially since most greater Kaiju need certain elemental specialists to deal with effectively. Some cities have hotlines to their nearest neighbors, but if a boss is on their way and you only have an hour to assemble a force while you are dealing with the initial wave, and the boss happens to be immune to something like temperature damage and your only class six is a fire projector, well. That boss comes in and plays Godzilla for a few hours until a class six disruptor or electrical projector shows up and hopefully is strong enough to deal with it.”

“Not to mention, if cities are close enough to help each other, they are often targets of a greater wave… they are both trying to deal with hordes of lesser Kaiju or maybe even a second boss at the same time,” he added.

I smiled more broadly, “What if there was a special team, full of decently high rankers that could instantly respond and had movement abilities or flying transport, and the right makeup to engage a wave before it got close enough to threaten the city? Like monster hunters, but without the ‘too busy fighting right now to help’ thing going on?”

“You mean, like a SWAT team of monster hunters that cover multiple cities, but instead of focusing on preventing breakouts, they had the power to handle them when they did occur? Well, it probably would have prevented the Seattle round-up or the Hudson Bay massacre. Unlike inland cities, monster hunters can’t keep the big boys culled in the ocean without waterbreathers, and if the cities weren’t there to blow them apart, they would come inland pretty damned quick.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“The Military does that, but the big boys and fighters usually just don’t have the ordnance to stop a greater Kaiju, even if they can make serious inroads on the swarms. It helps, but not enough.”

I nodded, “So we need a rapid response team for unexpected incursions inland and a heavy response team for ocean waves?”

He nodded. “Ideally, or we need more high-powered alphas in each coastal city and a rapid inland response team. But it’s not like class six alphas grown on trees.”

I smiled, “I have an idea. I hope you have a good day.”

***

Rendition was very… strange. Obviously she was teaching the Intro to Leadership class, which was a civilian class, but she wore her active duty outfit, all black pleather or something covered with pouched bandoleers, and a pair of swords on her back, like Rob Liefeld would have drawn Venom, with a black mask that only exposed her eyes. Gorgeous eyes and build, but that was alpha for you, maybe.

At first, when I joined the class, I had extended awareness out of habit to her. I couldn’t read her as an alpha, but I couldn’t read anything else about her either, which meant she was an alpha that had some kind of ability to block my senses. Her outfit was the good stuff, full contraweave that made it very clear just how great a slender runner’s build she had, and even her pouches and bandoleers were reinforced Proxovan. In an Alpha sense, she might as well have been wearing Hollywood designer clothes and expensive jewelry.

Her swords were old-school Japanese Katanas, with a maker’s mark from some ancient sword maker I didn’t understand, which was cool, and expensive, but I wouldn’t have used such valuable artwork as part of a combat suit. They were museum pieces, and breaking them over some armored brick’s head would be an utter waste of a beautiful relic. I wondered if it would be considered inappropriate to make her something… slightly better since it would be worth it to avoid damaging such precious and irreplaceable artifacts.

Then again, I didn’t know her powerset. Maybe using swords like that gave her some sort of spiritual strength and anything she held was invulnerable. I would ask, but she tended to enter the classroom just as the last student arrived and ghost the moment they left… and by ghost, I meant that literally, she disappeared. Alphas.

Which was why I had scrawled ‘Can I talk to you?’ at the bottom of one of the papers I turned in. What can I say? Even if Earth was dying, it was up to us to preserve as much of her history as we could, if humanity somehow survived.

Of course, based on the problem she just presented us with, I might be talking to her sooner than I expected, and not in a good way.

She noticed me shaking my head and facepalming as a guy in front of me, Mickey Candon, gave his answer, which was to minimize casualties by trying to shoot the dead man’s switch in some kind of miraculous display of gunplay and hope that it wouldn’t trigger and kill all the hostages.

“Mister Doyle, you disagree?”

Mickey sat down heavily as I slowly and reluctantly stood up, and Mindy glared at me as I was suddenly the focus of the class.

“Mickey’s solution isn’t that bad if you happen to be a circus trick shooter that practiced shooting targets at a spinning woman for the last fifteen years, but I’d have the team frosty or telekinetic hold the switch down, and check to see if the electrical controller can disable all of the explosive vests remotely. After all, we don’t know if they have gimmicked detonators, if the switch is a lie, or if…”

“Please stick to the problem as it is stated.”

I shrugged, “Fine, what are my superpowers? Do I have anything that can be used without exposing myself?”

She shook her head, “No, you are not an alpha.”

I sighed heavily, “Okay, what is around me? Is there any cover? Anything I can use as a weapon when I drop my firearm? Those weird posts that banks use to control the flow of customers? A garbage can or even its lid? A table where people sign checks, with the cables and pens attached to them and deposit slips? A sign that talks about low-interest rate loans?”

At her continuing headshakes, I started to get irritated, “How about my shoelaces or shoes? Am I wearing a vest or a wire?”

“That’s not the scope of the problem. The problem is to make the right decision, ethically.”

I nodded, “It’s a false dichotomy. A Trolley problem. It’s not about ethics at all. If I were a police detective, and even offered to step into a hostage situation without backup or preparation and preferably at least a class three alpha, I’d deserve to get fired on the spot for gross negligence. If I am just a bystander, why do I have a gun, if I am smart enough to have a gun, why would I let myself get caught in such a ridiculous situation like that in the first place? Every bank I have ever seen has glass doors, did I not bother to look and see all the hostages on their knees? If it was dark inside, I would never in a million years have even checked the doors to see if they were locked.”

“There IS no ethical solution, because it’s not about ethics at all, it’s about stupidity. If I am stupid enough to make all of those mistakes, then whatever answer I could give would have to be the stupidest possible action. Fine, if I let them take my gun and put on an explosive vest, I become part of the problem, so I would pull out my gun by the base, flip the safety, and shoot myself in the chest while handing it off. That way, someone will hear the gunshot and call the real cops, and maybe someone competent will come in and fix things. I am most likely dead, but then ethically it’s not a problem anymore and I’ve done the best I can for whoever survives. The fuckers will also be treated like murderers because a hostage is already dead, which might keep more police officers and hostages alive.” I felt like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School, if the business teacher had been a hot girl wearing skintight spandex that left nothing to the imagination.

Mindy was tugging at my shirt, and I sat down, a little irritated. Yeah, I get it, I am not leadership material, but I didn’t believe in no-win situations, and figured if you found yourself in one, you weren’t looking hard enough and had already made enough bad decisions that your ethics at that moment didn’t matter.

“Interesting solution, Mister Doyle, and I suppose it qualifies as ethical, but I would like to speak to you when we let out.”

Mindy whispered to me, “You are so in for it. Or are you trying to make a play? The whole ‘hate me or love me, you can’t ignore me’ thing?”

“Miss Pearlance, you have an alternate suggestion?” Apparently, her whisper hadn’t been quiet enough.

She stood up, blushing furiously. “Not really, I am with Jake on this one. Just being in that situation displays a series of poor decisions that render what you do afterward nearly irrelevant, ethically. Humans just don’t work that way, if you find yourself in a binary situation like that, it means you have stopped thinking and you are letting your enemies do your thinking for you, and they never have your best interests in mind. Giving them that power means you have already failed the only ethical decision that matters, by letting them turn it into a simple binary that they win no matter what choice you make.”

“I see. Well, let’s consider it tactically then. How about I give you a list of resources you can call upon to handle a similar situation? Let’s start with a class two hostage who you know has minor electrical control kneeling next to one of the gunmen taking cover behind a flowerpot. Is it ethical to consider using her as an ally, knowing she has a good chance of getting killed?”

The cross-talk continued in that vein for a while, but it was a little confusing. I had literally spent years setting up situations exactly like this for aspiring heroes, but the resources to encourage out-of-the-box thinking had always been at hand. As a supervillain-for-hire working for my own professional stunt company, I had been playing to lose, and while sometimes a hero had to be nudged a little to find a good solution, real life was always like that. Heck, the reason Mindy was even my sponsor at the academy was because in her alter ego at the time, Glacier Girl, I had interceded to help an accidental situation not turn into a bystander bloodbath, and she had been grateful enough to offer me a huge favor.

Probably, or maybe especially, because In blocking her ice bomb I’d gotten myself and my favorite supervillain armor mangled. But I had gotten better, and my armor and abilities were far more than they had been then. Good enough that I had changed school tracks from ‘team support’, or ‘chair guy’ to ‘field support’, or ‘tech guy’, with the intention of, if not becoming a city hero, at least helping the monster hunters turn the tide of the beast infections that made our post-q-bomb world so impossibly dangerous.

In the process, I learned that superheroes, called alphas, were only making the process worse because their abilities were tied to the emissions of the chaos rift that the Q-bombs had created. It was a catch-22 though. Without alphas, normal people would be slaughtered by monsters, but with them, the q-field emissions only got worse as they pulled energy from the chaos rift to operate and their bodies naturally discarded all of the q-field essence that they couldn’t use, which meant most of it. That meant more monsters, more alphas, and the planet slowly being reduced to a completely chaos-infested world.

Most male heroes died due to their imbalanced essence when they first manifested, but a few, like me, had been born with powers but without that connection to the chaos rift. For a long time, I thought that made me broken, but I was forced to realize that it could be a huge advantage. Maybe it could even turn back the tide of Chaos if I could help enough alphas cut off their connection and use the already-strong ambient essence, purifying it in the process. The exact REASON most males died was a mystery, but I had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with their yang energy, chaos essence, and the way that, in this world, most people were forced to awaken, in violence.

The problem was, as I discovered with Abbey, the process was very, very intimate. A process called dual cultivation was usually used in the process of having sex, because of that intimacy. There was simply no way I could, or would, have sex with enough alpha women to make a difference, but dual cultivation was, already, a powerful process for increasing my cultivation level without relying on stripping the radiation from toxic materials.

I had to hope that someday I could advance to the level of something called a ‘gold core’, which would be powerful enough to actually close the chaos rift long enough to make a difference. Of course, others could do it too, if they knew how, but knowing how was the hard part, and one I was struggling with as well. Sure, there were a million xianxia and martial artist fictions out there that described different processes, but they were like fantasy novels… every single one had its own magic system, and each system was invented by a writer for his own plot.

Add to that the fact that there were apparently monsters that had been preying on and using humans the entire time before the rift ever formed when essence was rare and internalized. Stuff like vampires and skinwalkers had accompanied humans for a very long time, gaining essence from killing and consuming them since long before whatever happened to seal Earth off from external essence happened. I had never seen one, but I had no doubt they existed and were probably growing fat and powerful in the essence-rich environment and the powerful humans that could absorb essence from the rift instinctively.

Which was why I had asked Colonel Moore for a trip to China. Apparently, their recorded history was long enough that they still had records, and maybe even techniques, that dated back to before this world became unfriendly to external essence. Akyo, too, was something odd and not quite human, as was Kali, and they seemed to know a lot more about how essence progression worked. Interviewing them was definitely on the menu.

It might even be fun since I seemed to have something they wanted, and both of them were, like all essence users, purified and turned into the pinnacle of attractiveness. Not that I was planning on becoming a man-whore, but even with a pocket full of money you can still enjoy window shopping.

Since she had put me on the spot earlier, I guess either Rendition had decided to take mercy on me, or she didn’t want the class to descend into a series of lessons on why ethical training was stupid without actually perceiving the underlying causes of what you were dealing with. Then again, with almost thirty students, many of whom were non-alphas training to join the well-paid support network for active hero teams, even short discussions of each scenario took up most of the period.

When the other students, including my alpha sponsor Mindy, had vacated the classroom, I was left with Rendition, who had chosen not to vanish as usual. I leaned against her table and tried not to be shocked when she simply stripped off the all-concealing hood she’d worn for the whole class.