Third hour was Art and as was increasingly common, Mrs Martin seemed a little hungover and pulled up a documentary over pointilism on the smartboard in lieu of teaching. I had no complaints.

I took the opportunity to slouch in my seat and slide my cell phone out of my pocket and into my lap. It was time to check what the RA had pulled up and refine my filters to train its AI.

The first couple of hits were anime, one of which I'd seen and kind of liked. A shit ton of missing person and locked room murder investigations were popping up on true crime blogs. None of them had any details but the sheer number that had popped up already was concerning. Those all got shoved into the keep pile.

Then there was a ton of web fiction, and I excluded them all from the list. Although I did bookmark a couple for later, uh, research purposes. A reddit thread looked promising, but it turned out to be some kind of rules set for a tabletop game I'd never heard of. Another for the discard pile. I hit the mother lode when Trigger videos started popping up.

I had to watch without audio but over the course of 15 minutes I saw videos of dozens of people my age performing utterly impossible feats. The guy levitating could have been a street magician or a green screen. The little Asian dude who tried to cling and jerk a pickup who ended up ripping the front bumper off had to be real. There was a tall guy who shot some kind of laser beams out of his eyes and melted crayons with them, and a short fat kid who Jackie Channed up the side of an office building with no visible wires.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

It probably wasn't all real, but there was just so much of it. Industrial Light and Magic or Marvel Studios could have made some videos that looked like these, but hundreds of them that all leaked on the same morning? I was pretty sure most of them were legit.

I couldn't help but compare myself to them. The trials had felt almost random, but at least a third of them had only been survivable through violence. I'm a hell of a wrestler, enough to be scouted by a couple D1 schools although I was planning on the local D2 cause they offered a full ride. I hadn't been watching my weight because it was off season, but I've been staying in shape. That and sheer bloody mindedness had carried me through the first 10 trials, but in the last half it'd been a speed rune and a whole lot of luck that had kept me alive.

The kinds of power I was seeing in the videos, I wasnt sure I could match that. Does that mean they got further in the trials than I did, or were there powers just better suited for combat?

By the time I left for lunch and to meet back up with T, I still hadn't found nerdicus rex and now I was riddled with doubt.