My “lab station” was a monument to my fraudulent existence: a desk, a computer that had seen better days, and a big box of electronic scrap that smelled faintly of ozone and shattered dreams. I was screwing around with the armors, trying to ignore the fact that my entire academic career in Power Exploitation was basically a farce.

  The course itself wasn't graded, which was the academy’s polite way of saying, “We have no idea what to do with you weirdos, so just try not to blow up the building.” Officially, we were supposed to find a mentor with similar abilities.

  My “similar abilities” mentor was a retired Class 8 gravity god I called Senpai Bob, who mostly just told me not to tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime before hanging up on me. So, self-teaching it was. The story of my life.

  Training in the radioactive tunnel had been going surprisingly well, a testament to my body’s newfound ability to treat carcinogens as a light snack. Even team training was… functional. Though some members of my ever-so-charming entourage—namely a certain ice queen and a wind goddess—were confused by my deep and abiding philosophical commitment to the concept of “The Chair Guy.”

  Especially after my recent, unscheduled field trip courtesy of the Maxwell Group’s express kidnapping service. Their solution to my understandable aversion to sudden movement? Ambush tactics.

  Candace, in particular, had taken to treating my existence as her personal pop-up training dummy. She’d jump me in the hall, the common room, once while I was taking a piss. Anywhere we were alone was fair game for a spontaneous sparring session, even if I was in civvies and holding a soldering iron. I wanted to get angry, but the terrifying harpy was right. It was helping.

  While there was no universe where I could ever hope to match her raw, physical, “I-punch-through-walls-for-fun” prowess, my fighting skills were improving from “pathetic” to “merely inadequate.” I was already damned close to her speed, which she claimed should have been impossible. I told her it was the power of cynicism. Really, it was just the sheer, pants-wetting terror of knowing she’d break my arm if I slowed down.

  Doctor Zheraine technically taught the Power Exploitation (Transformative) course, but it felt less like a class and more like a support group for misfit toys who couldn’t fit into the academy’s neat little boxes. It was mostly just lab time, which was understandable.

  The real focus was on the teamwork and combat logistics courses—you know, the ones that actually prepared you for a short, violent life of getting stepped on by a Kaiju. The first year was all about finding out what you were capable of, not proving your potential. It was a year-long orientation for the slaughterhouse. How comforting.

  As a result, my ‘homework assignment’—outside of my mandatory community service at the clinic, sentencing me to heal the very people who’d probably try to kill me later—was to do exactly what I did in my free time: building toys to keep my future meat-shields alive.

  Our student aid was a third-year gadgeteer named Traction, who looked at my work with the same confused reverence a caveman might give a microwave oven. She was mostly there for moral support, which in my case meant saying, “Wow, that’s… glowy,” before backing away slowly.

  Both Sabrina and Abigail were in my group. I guess it made sense, as our powers were all filed under “Support/Probably Useless in a Direct Fight.” Though it made things weird, since Abigail’s abilities were even more back-line than mine.

  Her “minor reality shifting” sounded impressive on paper, but in practice, it was less “rewriting the laws of physics” and more “creating really convincing, coherent illusions.” She could probably make a stunning replica of a bank vault, but you’d still break your hand trying to punch through it.

  Let’s be clear: I am not a real scientist. My formal education ended around the time I realized a degree in business management was useless when your business partner can turn into a diamond and crush your assets. I was a hack, a fraud with a box of scraps and a power that let me cheat. And right now, I was being bugged by a weird side-effect of my own cheating.

  Remember those microscopic processors I blueprint-copied? Well, when I made them perfectly, without any changes, they developed a weird, buzzing kinship. I noticed it when I installed them in two different helmets; they started having cross-talk, random data streams bleeding into each other, no matter the distance. It was like they were lonely.

  I was trying to figure out if it was a feature or a flaw, which was why I’d enlisted Abbey’s help. Her reality-warping senses were better than any oscilloscope.

  I waved my hand in front of one helmet sensor, recording the motion, and glanced at her. After a moment of that unnervingly focused stare, she slowly nodded. “Yep. It’s the same thing. The feedback is sending identical signals through both helmets, but it’s only some of them. It’s not consistent. It seems to be a bleed from an unforeseen interaction between individual parts of the subcircuits, rather than a deliberate transfer of information.”

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  I nodded, running a hand through my hair. “Sort of like static crossover? Crap. That’s why I was using silicon nanoclusters sheathed in carbon buckyspheres with a boron matrix. I was trying to prevent crossover signals. But this is weirder. It’s like the crossover signals themselves are being shared between the boron matrices.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked, tilting her head.

  I sighed, reaching for a metaphor she might get. “It’s like… You take a banana, coat it with chocolate, and put it in ice cream. When the banana warms up, it melts the chocolate just enough that some heat travels to the ice cream itself, because boron’s conductivity changes with its temperature. I don’t really understand the math—shocking, I know—but apparently some quantum particles that make up the ‘chocolate’ are susceptible to entanglement. So every time I make another identical banana split, all the bananas share their temperature with each other. They’re all miserably cold together.”

  I sighed again, deeper this time. “I think I need to actually read that book by Professor Duarte. The one on probability amplitude I’ve been using to prop up my monitor.”

  “Is it… a useful effect? Or just something we have to watch out for?” she asked, ever the pragmatist.

  I thought about it. Unless I wanted to hand-craft each and every microprocessor—a special kind of hell—the boron matrix was a deal-breaker. The more helmets I made, the more they’d turn into a chattering, interfering hive mind whenever they got active. That meant everything would need to be custom-built, a nightmare of inefficiency.

  On the other hand, if I switched to a different matrix, like antimony, it wouldn’t alter its conductivity based on temperature. The downside? Antimony isn’t exactly available at the local RadioShack, assuming those still existed outside of history books. I could create it easily enough, but that bid fair to make my suits worth more in pieces than I changed to make them.

  Two hours later, I’d jury-rigged a replacement using an antimony-matrix circuit. The result? Blissful silence. No interference. No chattering banana splits. “Much better.”

  Abbey, however, had been fascinated by the original flawed circuits. She’d been bugging me to keep them, her eyes alight with that particular curiosity that usually precedes a lab explosion.

  While the concept of provable quantum entanglement was so far over my head it needed a telescope, I humored her. I kept the old, pinhead-sized circuits. Maybe they’d be good for something. A very, very annoying paperweight.

  Kaiju Tactics was a FUN course! I’d expected a dry, depressing retrospective of all the ways humanity had been turned into paste, but it was actually a debate-and-discussion session followed by tactical war games. It was like Dungeons & Dragons, if the dragons were skyscraper-sized biological atrocities and a bad roll meant a fictional city got devoured.

  In essence, most Kaiju had known attributes boiled down into game-like stats. The course had set up scales containing numeric data on strength, durability, elemental resistance—all determined by the brave, doomed souls who fought them and the mad scientists who dissected the pieces. We got to play with these numbers, applying them to known Alphas and even to ourselves, to figure out the least suicidal way to achieve victory.

  I decided right then and there to do whatever it took to steal—ahem, incorporate—their ‘game database’ into my team’s armor heads-up displays. The sheer tactical advantage was staggering. More and more, I wished I was a programmer or had one on my team that I hadn’t just met after a kidnapping. I could imagine a thousand ways that kind of real-time data could save our hides.

  The statistics weren’t broad, either. Gynoscope (don’t ask!) was listed as 36 Strength, 28 Durability, with poison resistance in the teens. We plugged her into a simulation against a Basilisk and its poisonous breath.

  After running the numbers, we determined the most effective method was for her to charge right down the damn thing’s throat, activate her neurostatic entropy field, and rip her way out while her team handled the outside. It was insane, brutal, and utterly efficient.

  Doctor Kress, the course administrator, beamed as he explained that this exact tactic had eventually been employed by Gynoscope’s hunter team… but not before the Basilisk had taken out three of her teammates. One radiation-type glass cannon and two Class 3 supports.

  The team was eventually wiped out. If they’d adopted the tactic as quickly as our class did, they might have all survived. I felt a familiar, ugly twist of guilt. If I’d reported my actual power potential, some of our simulated losses might have been wins. A couple would have been absolute stomps.

  This guilt was compounded when our team, now outfitted with my custom-designed armors (approved by both the power exploitation and combat logistics teachers), suddenly became a dominating force in the tactics class. Our newly-enhanced stats made us virtual juggernauts. This, unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, led to our team’s first duel challenge.

  The moment the armor was approved, the beautiful and ever-so-talented Chinook decided it was time to reclaim her place on the solo ladder, which had been dropping while she babysat us in remedial courses.

  I was a bit gratified, until she informed me, in no uncertain terms, that she’d hitched her wagon to our train because, in her opinion, “You guys are going places faster than I’d ever get there on my own.” A touching vote of confidence, implying we were a high-speed vehicle heading directly off a cliff.

  Before I’d noticed, she’d shot up to rank 7 on the ladder, apparently using the armor’s dramatically increased impact resistance and hardened environmental support to train even harder down in our poisonous tunnel retreat. That meant only the top ten could challenge her, but the armor itself was attracting a different kind of attention. Not just for its durability, but because it was light and flexible enough for even non-bricks to use effectively.

  One unexpected side effect: because I’d designed it to channel essence so I could absorb energy, Chinook found she could use her winds even while the suit was completely environmentally sealed. I knew it could channel energy while blocking out offensive attacks, but I had no idea it would give environmental manipulators such a ridiculous edge. It was like building a submarine and accidentally discovering it could also fly.