She laughed, the tension breaking. “As an alchemist, I can totally confirm that. How are your energy levels? Are you ready to start trying to extend your power aura?”

  I nodded, grateful for the subject change. “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?” she asked, her tone teasing.

  I shook my head, “Nope, I was going to show you why Mindy thinks of me as a bad boy.” Time for a little practical demonstration. Theory was all well and good, but nothing beats a live-fire exercise.

  “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 in order to increase it’s 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 carved 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, and then 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 the entire time, almost effortlessly.

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

  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. The sheer versatility was the real power. A one-trick pony might hit harder, but I could hit you with the pony, the stable, and the farm it came from, all from different angles.

  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 it’s 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?” Sabrina asked, her voice holding a new note of respect.

  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.” It was all just physics. My power was the ultimate cheat code for the laws of thermodynamics.

  “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, where 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. Keeping the suits happy was its own form of energy conservation.

  “So what are you planning to do?” Sabrina asked as we walked back.

  I looked at her curiously. “Get some food, get a shower, read our assignment, and then go to bed.” The thrilling life of a super-powered scholar.

  She shook her head, “I meant about the girls.”

  I scratched my head. Was she not listening? “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.” I gave her a sidelong glance. “It means less competition for you, right?”

  “Why is that?” she pressed, ignoring my jab.

  “Because, as you said, alphas are using some sort of corrupting chaos energy. I swore off alpha girls a while back, for good reasons,”—the image of Crystal’s smug face flashed in my mind—“and now I just have a better reason.”

  With that, I kept my own council and we headed back towards the suite. My heart was a fortress, and its walls were built from the rubble of past betrayals. Letting another Alpha in wasn't just a bad idea; it was against my new architectural code.