I could still feel where they were from the coiling pools of energy at their cores, but it was a poor, fuzzy sort of vision.

  I made a mental note to install some kind of vision enhancement or pulse sonar in the next suit iteration. If I lived to make one. Okay, I would probably live. I was pretty hard to kill, but I was already feeling the potential power burn.

  “Yep. Did I mention most of us are stupid rich? Not me, the Northern Nation can’t afford to blow that kind of cash on one student, but Quiet Code? With her gifts, the data syndicates have probably been desperately throwing custom toys and gobs of money at her since she was a first-year. She’s a walking investment portfolio. Oahu probably volunteered so that someone less… friendly… didn’t get the chance to be the ringer.”

  “Less friendly?” I asked, though I dreaded the answer.

  “There are some people who would cripple you on purpose if they got the chance, just to prevent future competition, like Phantom Pain. She’s done that twice already to potential rivals. Broken bones, shredded ligaments, ‘accidents’ that took months to heal from. Oahu’s a good guy. A great nurse, as you said. He probably volunteered to make sure the match stayed clean, or at least, non-permanently-maiming.”

  I grumbled, “I’d like to see the bitch try,” quietly under my breath, but based on the sudden silence on the comms, I guess my team had heard me. The sentiment hung in the air, a little too raw, a little too real.

  Then a blue streak shot toward me, trailing a shimmering line of frost in its wake. Frost Phoenix. And she was fast. But she was also, I realized with a sudden, shocking clarity, a total amateur. I mean, look, I KNOW about microkinetic drain.

  I use it like a surgeon’s scalpel, precise and controlled, a necessary theft to fuel my own existence. She used it like a snowplow, probably because of her seemingly endless energy well. The thing is, when it came to the actual manipulation of those forces, her nearly mach one speed couldn’t even come close to the nanosecond-by-nanosecond speeds I was FORCED to work at when stabilizing and manipulating trillions of molecules at once.

  It was instinct. I casually, almost dismissively, started blocking off her kinetic drain of all the air and ground molecules immediately around her body, creating a perfect, invisible shell of stillness around her. She glanced at me with shock, her eyes wide behind her mask, realizing I could see her perfectly well despite her speed. I stuck out my tongue. A juvenile gesture, but it felt appropriate.

  In a moment, she stopped, frozen in confusion. And then she burst into flame.

  It was my fault. Of course it was. A catastrophic miscalculation born of ignorance. Without her constant absorption acting as a pressure release valve, the built-up, chaotic molecular motion around her ran wild, superheating the air until it ignited. She wasn’t just powered; she was a walking fusion reactor, and I’d just plugged the exhaust port.

  “Shit!” I yelled, my heart leaping into my throat. “Code one!” I was already moving, dashing toward the screaming, burning girl. The smell was awful. I grabbed her, the heat searing even through my armor's gloves, and hauled her off the ground, away from the burning polymer flooring beneath her feet.

  The air was worse, a torrent of uncontrolled energy, but something I could handle. I started to frantically siphon off the insane kinetic energy pouring off her, pulling it into myself. It was like trying to drink from a firehose connected to a nuclear reactor. My channels screamed in protest, flooding with a raw, violent power that felt like it would tear me apart from the inside out.

  I felt like I was going to explode. The girl might be limited by her control, but she was powerful as HELL, converting the ambient Chaos energy directly into momentum a thousand times faster than I ever could.

  I started desperately trying to compress the energy as it flowed into me, spinning it into a denser and denser form. It was rushing through my meridians, feeling like I was burning almost as badly as Frost Phoenix had, a spiritual agony to match her physical one.

  But she wasn’t as badly damaged as she probably thought. I imagine she felt like she was dying, but from my rapidly scanning microsense, it was mostly superficial, if horrific-looking. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to do a full-body reset on her.

  Her hair and costume were gone, incinerated, and she had pretty serious second-degree burns across most of her body, but from my point of view, that was an easy, if energy-intensive, repair job… her underlying cell structure was basically normal for an alpha, and reconstructing her outer dermal layer was well within my new, expanded range.

  I burned through the colossal influx of energy as fast as I could, directing it into repairing her. New skin, smooth and unblemished. I didn’t know how long her hair was originally, but I NEEDED a way to burn off the extra energy she was still feeding me a thousand times faster than I could spin it up and compress it.

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  Basically, after regrowing her eyebrows and a short bob, I just manually forced millions of hair follicle cells into hyper-accelerated growth, giving her about four feet of lustrous, fiery red locks that spilled over my arm. This was probably a good thing, since the fire had completely consumed her costume and right now she was naked as a jaybird, and had finally stopped screaming and started to hiccup, shock setting in.

  I heard Chinook screaming, “Forfeit! Forfeit!” over the roar of the crowd and the fading sizzle of cooked air, as I subsumed my consciousness and started running in place, even while holding the girl, trying to dive into a deep enough meditation to handle the immeasurable stress of getting filled like a water balloon on a fire hose. The world narrowed to the flow of energy, a desperate battle for control.

  Whoah. Cool.

  Where my stored energy had felt like a compressed, stubborn gas before, right now it was flowing like a river. A rich, powerful, seemingly endless stream of liquid energy. It still couldn’t match the blitzing, nova-like roil of power that your average combat alpha could pump out in a burst, but the sheer, dense volume of it was amazing to watch, a testament to the terrifying power I'd just accidentally tapped into.

  Even as I watched within my internal power space, the coils of spiraling liquid momentum were catching wisps of the overloaded, chaotic energy and forcibly liquefying them, assimilating them into the roiling, dense mass. I was incredibly glad that Sabrina had coached me into keeping the cycling going day and night, awake or asleep, a constant background process of spiritual focus, or this overloaded mass would have probably ruptured my meridians, destroying my powers and possibly even turning me into an even bigger human torch than Frost Phoenix had been a few seconds ago.

  The thing was, what I was doing, I wasn’t alone. I could feel another source of energy nearby, stretching, expanding, and swapping out energy with mine in a frantic, symbiotic dance. The nasty, unformed, chaotic energy was gone, turned into clean, smooth motion, and each of our cores could easily absorb, roll, and return the pure energy of motion and momentum between us. It was a circuit, a perfect, closed loop.

  Both my soul space and, I guess, Phoenix’s were scarred from the sudden influx, with a thin hairline of cracks like a cracked egg running through their overextended lengths, but they seemed to be slowly reforming, knitting back together as we swapped the energy back and forth, the liquid movement like a pair of twin whirlpools swapping water back and forth with each revolution, smoothing out the rough edges.

  To be honest, it was a little amazing, and more than a little intimate in a way that had nothing to do with the naked girl in my arms. It was a deep, fundamental connection. Especially since Phoenix was a complete stranger, I couldn’t even remember seeing her around the school until this match, but after this, I wasn’t sure if calling her a stranger would be right.

  More like a twin sister I had never met. I couldn’t peer into her mind or anything, and I was pretty sure she was unconscious, but her energy was… comforting. Familiar. A mirror of my own tumultuous relationship with power.

  “I didn’t know he could fly.” I heard someone say from a great distance, their voice muffled as if heard through water.

  “He isn’t flying, he’s floating,” I could hear Glacier Girl’s voice, sharper, clearer through our quantum link. “I can actually feel the energy coming off of him and Katie. It’s… stable. For now.”

  “Should we try to separate them?” That was Akyo, voice laced with worry.

  “I wouldn’t,” a deeper, calmer voice—Oahu—rumbled. “Whatever he’s doing to help her has set up a back-channel. She’s not pulling on the source right now, she’s pulling on HIM, and whatever he’s doing to absorb the kinetic feedback is really fragile. I don’t think we should move them until whatever this is comes to a close, let alone trying to separate them. You might cause a feedback explosion.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I heard Senpai Bob’s voice, laced with a weird mix of stress and professional fascination. “Arena’s closed. Full energy shielding went up the minute Chinook hollered, and I realized that Phoenix wasn’t supposed to literally rise from the ashes. From what I can see on the scanners, it looks like he’s trying to stabilize his flow and hers at the same time. I don’t know if it is fortune or misfortune that their powers are so similar that energy swaps work.”

  "Probably misfortune,” a mysterious, unfamiliar female voice added, cold and analytical. “I have never seen anything like that before. It was like her connection to the core itself erupted. The only time I’ve seen something even remotely similar was when a powerful male self-destructed when his secondary node unlocked. This is… unprecedented.”

  Bob coughed, and I caught the last bits of his words as I delved deeper into the pool of power at my core, starting the meticulous work of reconstructing the savage-looking cracks I saw in my soul space. Not just mine, but reaching out with my will to gently guide energy to hers as well, helping the fissures there to seal.

  “I don’t know if you will say that when she gets her power back under control. She’s already a two-core, and that looked a hell of a lot like she just unlocked a third major power reservoir. She’s probably going to be weak for a while, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she went up a class or two from this.”

  He paused, and his next words were directed at my team. “Now please, you are his team, go gather up the pieces of his armor while we wait for this to stabilize...”

  I didn’t need to look. The energy feedback, the sheer, uncontainable force of it that had vaporized her suit… it hadn’t been kind to mine either. My beautiful, itchy, incredibly expensive, junk-protecting armor hadn’t just broken. It had probably been reduced to its constituent atoms.

  I was floating several feet in the air in the middle of a shielded arena, holding a naked, unconscious, and potentially Class-upgraded girl, and I was almost certainly buck naked myself. In front of the entire school, the faculty, and God.

  Just another day at the office for Jake Doyle, aka Blueprint. The man who could turn any victory into a spectacle of utter humiliation. At least the itching had stopped.