The number 4.37 flashed on my bathroom scale.

  I stared, half-expecting it to change, but it stayed the same. I stepped off of it and nearly slumped to the floor in relief.

  It wasn't that I'd dieted down to the borderline anorexic weight of 43.7 kilograms. I had never gone that far in my first life, even at my most self-conscious. The teen girl eating disorder epidemic barely existed in this world.

  No. It had been two weeks since I gained access to Jane, during which John, Alicia, and I had been trying to reverse-engineer a level gauging device. The 4.37 was an attempt to measure my ability level. It was correct, the exact same number I'd received from a recent checkup… which meant our attempts had finally succeeded. From now on, I would know my level like I knew my weight, as easily as stepping on a custom-modded scale.

  And it was growing fast. 4.23 to 4.37 with only June and half of July. My rate of progress was rapid enough that it had made me question what I knew about Aurology and Ability Science, until I'd recently figured out the cause.

  The cause happened to be standing outside the bathroom, waiting for me.

  "Did it work?" John called through the door. "Please tell me it does. If I have to sense the aura flow inside that piece of metal again, I swear I'm gonna throw up."

  I opened the door. "I still don't understand the nausea," I said. "The machine got my level right, though, so I guess you won't have to deal with it."

  "Finally." His face started to light up. "Does that mean we can finally go to a Battle Event? Or a few of them? I haven't seriously fought in like two weeks, so-"

  "But it might be hard-wired to display '4.37' for any input, so you should try it too."

  He clicked his tongue and shot the scale a glare, but ultimately obliged. We both waited in anticipation as he stood on it. When '4.19' appeared in glowing amber text, he turned back to me with a pleading look.

  "0.01 too high is basically nothing." He cringed. His measurement from this morning was 4.18. "You're not gonna want to start over, are you?"

  "It's probably not worth it," I said. "And it's already been six hours since the morning checkups, so maybe a small growth is what we'd expect."

  I did some mental calculations. "Yeah. I would have been more worried if it still said 4.18. I'd say we're done."

  I smiled and gave him a slightly ambiguous hug, squishing him. Once we separated, and John alternated his grin between me and the new machine. Now that it wouldn't be the source of his suffering (sensing aura inside non-humans gave him awful vertigo, apparently), he could look at it with what looked more like pride.

  I felt a similar kind of accomplishment. Through the past two weeks, Alicia, John, and I had put hundreds of combined hours into getting the thing to work. It hadn't responded at all at first, then got stuck evaluating everyone to level 9.9, and then spent three iterations failing to process levels above 3.5… For a while, we'd thought that the construction blueprints we had were incomplete.

  That would have been awful for us. We got the blueprints in the first place by 'visually eavesdropping' on the password and credentials of a level 7.2 god-tier, one of the highest-ranking executives. I had managed to sneak one of his hairs for Alicia to use. If a top higher-up's corporate account wasn't high enough on the access hierarchy, we were in trouble. Thankfully, we'd started making progress again, now culminating in the uncreatively named Footscanner V-6, helpfully disguised as a bathroom scale.

  "I was hearing way too much happiness for a failure," said Alicia, having joined us while we were admiring the machine. "Does that mean it really works now?"

  "It was already working for you," John said, with almost no bite. "But yeah. It got us both with good accuracy."

  "It's possible there's a new cutoff, like it doesn't work on god-tiers," I added. "We'll have to test that."

  "But it basically works," Alicia summarized. "Thank God."

  She smiled morbidly. "Actually… now I'm sort of wondering if we'll get the same issue that we had before, just in reverse. We made it less sensitive to keep it from overloading, but maybe it's worse now at detecting smaller inputs."

  She stepped on the scale. The measurement took much longer to appear than the two earlier ones, and I felt disappointed when it finally did.

  1.99, it read. Alicia's most recent measurement was 1.94.

  "There's probably more of an error range with weaker input," I guessed. "1.94 to 1.99? I doubt your level increased that much in just a few days."

  "…You never know." Alicia looked like she almost wanted to believe it. "Maybe I hit a sudden growth spurt or something."

  "Eh. I know you grew a bit, but there's no way your level's gotten that high," John said, grinning at her expense. "It's kind of sad, 'cause a humongous measuring error like that means the thing's basically useless. Guess we'll have to start all over again..."

  Alicia's eyebrow twitched in annoyance. She shoved him lightly, and he toppled backward, knees folding as he fell butt-first into my overlarge bathtub. Then she quickly turned the showerhead to cold. A chilling pour started, forcing John to scramble on all fours to the bathtub's far side.

  She giggled down at him. "Serves you right, you asshole."

  Briefly, I felt worried that he'd get angry with her. John just smiled with glowing eyes. He promptly activated a copy of a telekinesis ability, and black, elastic energy yanked Alicia under the frigid shower. She half-shrieked and half-squealed at the cold.

  Reflexively, I went to 'rescue' her. She repaid me by dragging me with her under the freezing spray. I yelped and glared at her, returning fire, and we somehow devolved into undirected splashing.

  By the time we left the bathroom, it was with waterlogged clothes, shivering and laughing.

  It had been a productive two weeks.

  .

  .

  .

  After I dried off and changed, I found Alicia and John talking at the kitchen counter, discussing near-term plans.

  There was still a faint bit of discomfort when they spoke without me. Still, things were far improved compared to the first time they met – after which Alicia had whispered to me, "I think you're the only reason he's acknowledging that I exist."

  "We need to test the Footscanner more," Alicia was saying. "I think we should set up an ability-gauging stand."

  "What?" John said. "You mean like the ones they have in the mall? 'Measure above a five, win a prize?'"

  "Yeah, exactly. We can buy stuffed animals in bulk for the prizes. People go for these kinds of things."

  He made a smiling, incredulous expression, to which Alicia crossed her arms.

  "I'm serious!" she said. "I got caught up celebrating, but we still need to check if the machine gets normal people's levels right. You two are outliers; Meili had her whole ability evolution saga, and you're basically a freak of nature."

  He shrugged. "I don't want to work at a stand for no pay. Or get security called on me for having no permit."

  "And if it was just for a day…?"

  "I'm not stopping you," John said. "But I had to skimp out on training ever since we started making the scanner, so now's the time to compensate."

  While they talked, I busied myself washing our dishes from last night (keeping them speaking to each other and not me). John's unique definition of 'skimping out' was three hours of daily training. Even with the recent handicap, he'd still rocketed from 3.0 to 4.2, 10x-ing my (already-fantastic) growth rate this summer.

  Naturally versatile abilities like mine seemed to suit him. Devil's Hands offered a near-infinite array of choices, from spiked whips to sledgehammers and everything in between, but he already swapped between them with an easy naturalness when we fought.

  My theory was that Aura Manipulation came with an inherent boost to complex decision-making. Maybe protection against decision paralysis. Most likely, this enhancement was what allowed John to fight with four copied abilities at once in canon.

  Whatever the cause, Devil's Hands was a near-perfect copying target for John, so he'd been copying it from me every day.

  This was the reason for my own accelerated level growth. Training him was like watching a Devil's Hands user grow from 3.0 to 4.2, which already would have been helpful for my development. But it was much better than that, because John had developed the features and attributes of Devil's Hands out of order. He could already manifest twenty individual claw 'fingers,' which I couldn't yet do, but his piercing potency was no better than what I'd had at level 3.9.

  I got to watch, in real time, as he figured out how to do the very same things I was currently learning. And unlike everyone else, John could tell me the exact changes in his aura technique that corresponded to an improvement. I hadn't realized the full implications at first. It was apparent, now, that I had lucked into a massive shortcut. I was effectively skipping multiple desperate fights, dozens and dozens of training hours.

  The shortcut was temporary, though. In a few months, the features John worked on would be years beyond my current capabilities: like the tree of thorns my grandfather had created, or the diamond-dusting, rotating drill that I only knew as a theoretical possibility. And it wasn't as though John was going to spend all his time experimenting with Devil's Hands. He was already planning to get involved in real fights.

  "I searched through the upcoming Battle Events in New Boston," John was saying. "I've been waiting for years to finally get strong enough for one. But now that it's finally my chance, it turns out my level's too high to be eligible."

  "You mean you can be too strong to enter?" Alicia asked.

  "Yeah, and it's stupid," he complained. "For the sixteen-and-under events, the ones with teams of three, your group's average level has to be between 3.5 and 3.8. For balancing purposes. I completely missed my chance."

  She hummed thoughtfully.

  "That's unlucky," she said. "Could you still enter, just with a lower-tier team member to bring the average into that range?"

  "I guess," John said. "But the rules shouldn't force you into teaming with a low-tier, anyway."

  Now done with the dishes, I pursed my lips at his words. Alicia would have found the comment insulting if she had my otherworlder sensibilities. Still, in comparison to this world's typical harshness (example: "Who would want a weakling, low-tier anchor to drag them down?"), I understood that it was lighter than air.

  "Actually, I think I have a silver bullet for all of this," I said unprompted. "Something you're both going to like."

  They turned toward the sink, facing me. I held up my phone screen, which showed a picture of a mountain and some text.

  "It's called King of the Hill," I explained. "Battle event for ages sixteen and under, sponsored by NxGen. The winners are supposed to get a special prize, prototype serum candies that heal your wounds."

  I smiled and shook my head.

  "But that's a lie. I realized while I was exploring the admin account we broke into. They don't rely on the biological processes that serums do - the candies are actually based on Aurology instead. They heal you by giving you a temporary second ability, Regeneration."

  "...What? Wait a second, they can actually do that?" John was obviously surprised. "Meili, isn't this exactly the kind of thing you're saying you need my help to do?"

  "I didn't know until yesterday," I said truthfully. "NxGen's not just hiding it from the public. They're hiding it from most of the researchers, too."

  My guess was that they were secretly distributing an early prototype for testing purposes. Every senior researcher at NxGen was (probably rightly) obsessed with testing.

  Meanwhile, realization was spreading on Alicia's face. "So our goal is to…? Oh. Oh."

  "Exactly." I nodded in confirmation. "We don't need to be pioneers. Reverse-engineering is perfectly fine by me."

  ***Beautiful***

  John slipped through the crowd of the competition, using copied Telekinesis to pluck hairs from anyone who felt strong.

  The hundred elite-tier teenagers stood at the base of a small mountain. It was an Authority-managed nature park outside the city, green everywhere with vegetation, humid and buzzing with summer insect sounds. The cicada's chirping was particularly loud, and with his Telekinesis he could feel their hidden, vibrating bodies in the red maples and pines all around them.

  Some minority of people stood off to the side of the main crowd, including Alicia and Meili. Those who came with pre-decided teammates, or those who'd been quick to form them. But most of the competition weren't grouped, so now they were all mingling in a clump to find teammates, lots of them trying to out-talk each other to be heard.

  In the clump, a blue-haired girl grabbed his arm. She asked if he was looking for teammates, what his level was. He took the chance to feel her aura, pegging her around a 3.8 - too weak to be of notice. He shook his head and moved on.

  King of the Hill was going to start in an hour. A tall man in formal clothes was standing at a portable booth, handing out high-tech armbands for all the participants. There was also a rulebook, which everyone had been ordered to download on their phones before arriving.

  John didn't think it was necessary. Ultimately, the final team remaining on the mountain would be the winner – if you ever lost consciousness or left the battle zone, your armband would count it as an elimination. There were minor details, but it was really as simple as that.

  Also, of the thirty-five teams that would form, maybe four or five would try hard enough for the precise rules to matter. Most people just went to battle events to have fun or get training done. But the prize was important enough for Meili and Alicia to want to play dirty, and he'd agreed, so he was collecting spying material for them to use.

  In the end, it took him less than fifteen minutes. The result was a handful of hairs, only from people who felt like they were no weaker than he was.

  "Good job," Meili said once he regrouped with them. She and Alicia had found a boulder to sit on, a small distance away from the big crowd of people. "How many did you get?"

  "Like eight," he said, counting the hairs to make sure. He nodded and handed them to Alicia, who immediately activated her ability and started doing her creepy vision-switching ritual. "You think that's enough?"

  Meili shrugged, gesturing out to the crowded rainbow of every possible hair color. "If only eight of them are stronger than you, that's good news. Now we just wait."

  John nodded and sat down. Alicia started alternating which hair she held in her hand, probably memorizing each 'POV' by noting which clothes they wore.

  He felt a bit disappointed that the event wasn't going to be what he'd built it up to be in his mind. All their strategizing and planning ran counter to his old fantasy of showing up to a battle event and winning out with pure combat strength. But he wasn't greedy enough to complain – not when it was already slightly unreal, just how much his life was changing for the better.

  After he unlocked his ability, John's daydream fantasies of life as a high-ranker had all followed the same theme. He would be powerful. Do things he couldn't do, go places he'd never been, make demands and have them met. He would live freely and straightforwardly, stop relying on plans and tricks, instead lifting himself with his own strength.

  He wouldn't have to be a coward to live; he would leave himself behind.

  Then, two weeks ago, Alicia had shown him her 'spying supplies.' A massive collection of hair from important people, which Meili constantly added to, so they could see things they really weren't supposed to. Meili was actually among the weakest, lowest-ranking people at NxGen, he'd learned, so she was constantly using tricks and espionage to get what she needed.

  So the two of them were messing with his expectations, in more than one way. What Meili meant by 'help with research' was something far larger than he'd expected, and a lot of the things they'd done were massively illegal. He had naturally attributed this to Alicia at first, thinking of her as a corrupting influence, until it turned out that everything was Meili's idea.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  From the very beginning, even, it was all her idea. Before she set foot in New Boston, Meili had already been planning to steal secrets from her future bosses. All to reach an ambition that he didn't fully understand.

  But he had promised to help her, at the end of the day, and as far as he was concerned, Meili could ask him to kidnap a first-grader and he'd owe her enough to agree. He could have easily been stuck at 3.0 without her help, stuck treating 3.8s like gods. And of course it helped that being involved was mostly enjoyable, because she was pleasant, and clever, and not rigidly arrogant like Zirian or other high-rankers.

  …Also, there was this sentence Meili muttered to herself, every once in a while: "I can't just do nothing with what I have."

  So, once the competition started, John willingly used his experience to find a thick spruce for them to hide in. The kind with green needles so dense and abundant that it made you invisible if you hid well. He took no issue with sitting silently for another hour, waiting as all the teams that didn't care about the prize took each other out.

  Then, once the field had thinned to a measly ten people, he had no problem taking directions from Alicia to find and sneak-attack the remaining strong competitors.

  It was incredibly easy. Alicia stayed behind, hidden in the tree, and switched between the hairs to keep track of the competition. She constantly funneled positional information to him and Meili through the earpieces they'd brought. Free-for-all fighting was simple, it turned out, when surprise was only ever on your side.

  They launched ambush after ambush, each one short and decisive, never giving their opponents time to adjust – really to do anything but lose. It was his first time executing this type of pre-planned combat. The process felt machinelike, cold and detached compared to the heat and emotion he was used to; in that sense it was a disappointing anticlimax. But Meili had already shown him, through the past two weeks, that this was simply what you did if you wanted to be a winner.

  He outed the lights in a brunette girl's head, then checked his armband. It read: 'Four competitors remain.' He was just about to ask Alicia if she knew how to find their final opponent-

  -But then he heard a high-pitched whistling noise, growing louder behind him.

  John turned around, barely in time to see a truck-sized pine tree burrowing into his stomach. The projectile snatched the life from his lungs on impact, drilled him down into the dirt like a missile, dimming the world to black.

  ***Beautiful***

  I cursed under my breath.

  An upside-down pine tree stood lopsided, its branches plugged into the earth while thin straggly roots waved aboveground. John was trapped underneath it, around twenty feet down in the dirt. My armband still said that there were four people left, which meant he hadn't gone unconscious, but that didn't mean he had the strength to dig himself out.

  In the air above me, a gray-haired boy with metallic eyes sat on a floating log. An elastic silver energy surrounded the wood, shuffling it back and forth in the sky, though it stayed at a consistent elevation.

  Obvious telekinesis, I thought rapidly. But Telekenesis users don't start flying until they're above 4.5, so this guy's way stronger than-

  "-Hey! Are you competing in the Battle Event?" I shouted up at him. "We're in the final few minutes. I don't know what you're attacking us for, but-"

  "I'm just trying to win, plain and simple." The silver-eyed boy smiled down. "You guys are the ones who have some explaining to do."

  His eyes flashed. The tree he'd launched started rotating, again, drilling further into the ground with John below it.

  "What the hell are you talking about?" I had no option but to make him talk.

  "Exactly what I said," he replied. "I know what you two did, because I did the same thing."

  He made a face and shrugged.

  "Okay, not quite - I dragged two mid-tier scrubs here to weigh the team average down, and told them to scram when it started so I could solo it. Not really the same as your clever little hair strategy."

  He snorted a small laugh, and then it grew into louder belting, echoing down from the sky.

  "But that's not the point. Your partner had the audacity to try to use his Telekinesis ability on me. On me, of all people! Of course, I saw it coming and replaced the hair he stole with someone else's. I realized one of you losers was going to try something tricky, some utility ability that needs hair-"

  Below the ground, John let out a string of agonized curses.

  "-so I sat back and enjoyed the show, and now I'm making sure the cheaters won't prosper."

  I glanced at my wristband. It still read 'four,' so I decided in a split second that John could probably hold out without me forfeiting to help him. Discreetly, I morphed one of my claws to a millimeter-thick, near-unnoticeable blade, extending it slowly into the sky.

  "Okay, what?" I said. "Do you want a 'congratulations'? Like I'm going to start praising your genius if you keep going? Just come down here and fight already!"

  The floating boy shook his head with a smile.

  "I already decided that I want to win. So no. You just sit there until I drill your partner into unconsciousness. Then I'll go find the girl with the hair ability, and I'll finish you off last."

  The tree was still drilling into the dirt, rotating, but the rate it descended was slowing. I acted increasingly panicked, like I was finally realizing the situation was bad. Made a show of glancing back and forth between the flying boy and the ground where John was buried. As though I didn't know who to focus on.

  Secretly, my claw was closing in on him – until it pierced an inch into the underside of the floating log he was sitting on. I tested its density. Strong telekinesis users could densify and toughen the objects they controlled, but the log was as brittle as normal wood.

  So I thrust upward as hard as I could. The gray-haired boy cursed in surprise. My muscles strained, stretching an already-stretched claw, but it was enough to shatter the floating wood into raining pulp. Enough to puncture the bottom of his thigh. I forced it to snake through his flesh, extending and twisting to break as much bone as I could, sending the rest of my claws like a herd of vipers.

  He thrashed, made a failed attempt to dislodge my claw with his hands. He was barely keeping himself in the air by levitating his own clothes. But my claw was too thin to be crippling, I realized, as a tremendous force gradually constricted around me.

  My left knee buckled, then my right. I lost all control over my body, including my claws, and I was suddenly kneeled over the grass. I tried to wince, but my facial muscles were glued stiff, and then I was bashing my head on dirt and rock like a suicidal woodpecker.

  My vision blurred but didn't fade. I felt thankful for my body enhancement.

  I quickly de-manifested my claws before they were turned against me. But before I could try to break free, two boots crashed down on my neck, stuffing a mouthful of soil and worms down my throat. I tried to thrash in a panic, and my gag reflex screamed at me to roll over and cough, but the psychic binds were too tight to do either. My body wanted to throw up but failed.

  I felt a numbing stomp on my spine. A hot, heavy impact to the back of my head knocked me flat against the ground.

  My vision swam for a moment, distorting everything into vague shapes. I played possum and sent my claws to tunnel beneath the earth. Once I felt my claws surface behind me, where I knew the boy was standing, I turned them into blenders – Vietnam War pit traps for both of his legs.

  I started the blenders on his flesh.

  He shrieked a curse, something hoarse and ugly and raw. But the telekinetic binds never loosened. They grew instead, gradually tightening around my claws until he had full control.

  I only barely de-manifested them before his psychic force thrusted me down the mountain, rocketing me like a bullet, only stopping once I slammed headfirst into a tree.

  Numbing twinges rattled through my spine, my nervous system. My muscles wanted to sleep.

  I took a dangerously long blink, then jolted to clarity when I felt something wet. It was a light coating of blood from my forehead, dripping down onto the tree bark, staining it a brownish pink.

  I turned hurriedly and found the gray-haired boy. He hadn't moved, crouched a few hundred meters further up on the mountain, with the mess of valleys and craters I'd gouged into his legs. Blue scraps of denim, what had once been his jeans, were jammed in the wounds – he was trying to dig them out.

  "I know you're awake!" The boy said loudly. "You're not pulling anything, alright? Just stay down!"

  I really wish I could, I thought bitterly. Ability-granting candies don't show up in canon. When will I get another chance?

  I tried looking for John, wanting to know where he'd escaped to in the fighting. Then I realized that the upside-down pine tree was still spinning, drilling into the ground… which would have been pointless unless John was still trapped.

  All that pain, and the silver-eyed boy had never let go of his control.

  He must have been able to see my face, because he choked out a laugh. "Yeah. Oh yeah. You like that? Your partner's still right where I want him. And just so you know, I have a healing factor, bitch!"

  Five boulders, some coated in dirt or moss, levitated into the air. They spun like threatening tops.

  "The prize is mine." His face twisted into a nasty grin. "Give up, or you'll all be living on oxygen tubes for a month."

  ***Beautiful***

  The pine tree was tougher than diamond and denser than lead.

  Even the needles, or what John thought were pine needles, were stiff like iron spikes.

  Agonizingly, he'd managed to dislodge the massive object from his stomach, holding it up above his head with his claws interwoven into some kind of platform. But the tree was still drilling endlessly, forming a kind of claustrophobic coffin. It took all the power in his claws just to keep himself from sinking any deeper into the earth.

  Not his lower body, his legs. Pushing with them would put force into the ground, literally digging his own ditch. Still, he could tell he was losing the fight; the dim light above him was slowly fading to nothing.

  He stumbled and lost more ground when his earpiece buzzed. Alicia was contacting him. "What?" he snapped, trying to better adjust his feet.

  "What's your situation?" came her muffled voice. "Are you alright?"

  He growled. "I'm getting stuffed down the throat of a goddamn mountain!"

  "Sorry. I mean, do you think you can last a few more minutes and launch one final attack?"

  John lost another three feet from the distraction, taking a second to get what she was saying.

  "I'm not switching to Telekinesis!" he barked once he realized. "That's insane! The tree's going to drill a hole in me before I can get any control of it!"

  Alicia's voice hardened. "Well, Meili has our opponent pretty badly injured. But she can't get to him, and now he's healing. So there's no point in stalling-"

  "Sounds better than getting turned into a skewer for nothing."

  "-And I have a plan, alright? So just listen to me!"

  He rolled his eyes. It was a low chance that Alicia would come up with a fighting tactic he couldn't think of. Still, the past two weeks had at least shown that she was smart in other ways.

  He tried to heave a sigh, but only fatigued panting came out. "...If it's stupid I won't do it."

  "Thank you," she said, then hesitated. "Um. I know this is going to sound bad, but… If you copy Telekenesis, can you survive a normal-weight tree crashing on you?"

  ***Beautiful***

  I clenched my teeth, gripped the boulder in my enlarged claw, and returned it to its sender. The silver-eyed boy simply squinted and halted it in the air. Two more approached from my sides, spinning with torque, and ground white sparks into my giant palms.

  He was trying to shove me down the mountain. I wedged my feet into the ground at an angle, desperate for leverage, and finally forced the boulders to a halt in my hands. I whipped them back as hard as I could.

  He blocked, faked a yawn, and sent three more.

  If I got too close then he'd control me, and he would put all his mental force into attacking John if I ever ran too far. And he couldn't chase me, either – moving too would force his control of the tree to weaken, letting John escape. So it had been a game of dodgeball, where the small area around the tree formed our bounds. All the while, his injuries had been healing; the fleshy valleys and craters were getting closer to sidewalk cracks and potholes.

  But my ankle had healed, too. I was almost back at full speed. Only I hadn't shown it, instead keeping myself at the same artificially reduced pace, counting down the few remaining seconds in my head.

  He created a bee-like swarm of smaller rocks, forming a loose circle around me before dragging them toward me all at once. Right as he did, Alicia shouted the go-ahead in my earpiece. I immediately accelerated to my full speed, scraping through the storm before it could fully condense, and charged directly at the gray-haired boy. His eyes widened in surprise.

  The element of surprise got me half the distance between us. But then my feet started to drag, my steps lost their force – and once I was just a dozen feet away, my muscles and joints locked up with cramps. Then only my claws remained. I swung up at his face with them, two crimson guillotine blades, but they scraped ineffectually against a shield of enhanced rock.

  Finally, I lost all control. I couldn't move again, not my claws, not my eyelids, not anything. The boy levitated me a body length into the air, shaking his head with mock sadness, and floated three head-sized rocks to my eye level. They glowed with a silver outline.

  "You can't blame me after I warned you," he gloated.

  He paused for dramaticism, and as the moment stretched I started to feel nervous. Then, in an instant, the smallest of the floating rocks went from silver to pitch-black.

  It was John's ability.

  Suddenly dark as obsidian, the rock rushed downward like a conscious arrow, crashing full-speed into the silver-eyed boy's skull. It left a bloody, gushing welt.

  His eyes rolled back instantly, and he fell in a heap, unconscious.

  The whole thing took a fraction of a second. I dropped to the ground, running to the boy at full sprint to ensure he was really knocked out – and then remembered, belatedly, to check my armband.

  Three competitors remain, it read. Our victory.

  No months of waiting, maybe years, for another opportunity. I won't ever need to wonder if I let my only chance pass me by.

  I collapsed into myself, relieved and heaving for air.

  …

  I had no more than a few minutes to dedicate to my thoughts, my fantastical and hopeful (and now most of all possible) plans for the future, before Alicia's voice buzzed in my ear.

  "Are you alright?" she asked.

  She's worried about you, I thought. She's never seen you use anything close to the level of viciousness you used just now.

  "Yeah," I said. "I feel fantastic."

  She went conspicuously silent, then lightened her tone. "Thank God. That was cutting it way too close… And you know what's insane? Of those three rocks, I wanted John to use the big, jagged, gnarly-looking one." She laughed breathlessly. "We might have lost if he did that. But he made the right decision, picking the smallest one - faster to take control over."

  "And he's okay, right?" I asked.

  "Thankfully. Once the guy went unconscious, the tree he controlled reverted to normal, flimsy wood. John had enough body enhancement to take the hit."

  "Good," I exhaled. Then I realized, with a little bemusement, that I didn't quite know what the plan had even been. "Hey, do you want to explain to me how the heck that worked?"

  "Well… My guess is that the guy you were fighting is about a 4.7." I heard Alicia's satisfied grin through the earpiece. "It was already pretty hard for him to turn that pine tree into a drill and control your body at the same time, which is why he wasn't able to knock you out the first time he got total control of you. Not enough juice left. So his control of whatever he used to finish you off was always going to be weak. He'd have no power left for a psychic barrier over his skin, either."

  "Nice. That's super smart."

  I started heading to the hole where John and the tree were buried. "And I'm guessing that, from there, John used his aura sense to figure out how to steal a projectile?"

  "Exactly. He was a little bit opposed to getting a tree to the torso, but we talked through it."

  I nodded, staring down the thin, deep hole with an upside-down pine tree in it. The tree was now thirty feet below ground, which meant that John was something like fifty feet underneath me.

  "Are you alive down there?" I shouted.

  My voice echoed for a bit. John groaned as I pulled the tree out of the hole with my claws.

  "I think I'll be... fine in a few days," he rasped.

  "Want me to come help you up?"

  I saw him nod with my enhanced vision, so I leaped down into the hole, dragging my claws against the sides for traction. When I reached the bottom, I offered him my hand, frowning once he seemed too weak to take it.

  "Hey," I said. "I'm serious, are you alright?"

  His shirt was gone, his bare upper-half turned red and purple and brown, one massive tie-dye bruise.

  I stood there, worried, while John lay unmoving and stared thoughtfully into the air. "I'm really fine," he answered. "Just thinking about these past couple of months."

  He coughed, and his voice regained some strength.

  "It's pretty insane, isn't it? How fast things are changing. A few hours ago, while I was grabbing hairs, a 3.8 asked me to join her team. But I barely heard her, because my first thought was that she was too weak to pay attention to. A 3.8. I keep getting stronger, and stronger, and I keep wondering why you're helping me so much, getting basically nothing back."

  He grinned up at me weakly. He took my hand and rose to his feet.

  "I thought this would be a good start, but it feels like I still owe you a metric crapton, Meili."

  I smiled back, but it was fake. I winced in my mind.

  If only I weren't such a liar, a fabrication, my thoughts would have been positive. Appreciative of the nice moment.

  Instead I thought: God, I'm running out of time, aren't I?

  Of course, I knew this was my opportunity. I felt the atmosphere, heard the gratitude in his voice. But it wouldn't be long until he rose too high for me to touch. I had known, from the beginning, that I needed something more than gratitude to motivate him – it was too possible that John would stop helping me, once he felt like there was nothing left to repay.

  "After today, I think I owe you too," I replied softly. "Yeah. I think I have to tell you something."

  "Oh." He seemed confused. "Sure. What is it?"

  "Well… It's about our prize, the regeneration candies." I drew on real nervousness in my act. "When I learned about them yesterday, I got suspicious. Kind of like you, John. Granting a temporary ability by eating - I didn't think it was possible."

  I fidgeted. "So I looked deeper into it, figured out the creation process. But I don't know if I should…"

  "Just tell me, Meili," John said with a laugh. "You can't leave me hanging now that I'm curious."

  Right now, I decided. While he likes me this much. While he's still grateful. While he's most trusting.

  "Okay," I said. "First of all, your Mom's name is Jane, right?"

  ***Beautiful***

  Alicia watched in silence through her best friend's eyes.

  Lately, she'd spent more time in other people's viewpoints than her own, so she'd developed a tolerance. For watching live trainwrecks without a say, helplessly, as nothing but a phantom observer.

  She'd seen violence, barbaric and inhuman, incompatible with reason. The most vile, unjust words to ever peel off a person's lips.

  She'd seen documents, government plans, that dictated a million lives before their births. Instant murder in an eye-blink, as though a human life wasn't even worth a hand motion.

  It was an endlessly repeating car crash, the same thing copy-pasted, with cosmetic changes to the paint jobs, the vehicle models, the number of passengers. Meili wanted to be a traffic cop, to shout 'stop' before the crash, and even wanted to throw herself in the way.

  "No," said John. "No. No, I don't get it, Meili. This really isn't funny."

  "I'm not trying to be," Meili said. "In the files, they talk about your mom like she's livestock. A cow to harvest from. I really need you to take this seriously, John - they make the candies from her. And they know you exist, too."

  Just this is nothing, Alicia told herself, watching John recoil at the words. Only twenty minutes earlier, Meili had been slicing away at her opponent's flesh, and now clean-up crews were roaming around the mountain to collect all the blood the hundred boys and girls had collectively shed. All of this harm was done giddily, all for fun and sport. Meili didn't hurt anyone for fun. She resorted to it when the other options were worse.

  ...And yet, and yet, Alicia still felt that Meili was being uniquely cruel. She'd found the deepest wound in this boy's body. Scratched it open and pulled it wide. From now on she would realign John's insides, his internal desires, by sticking her Devil's Hands inside.

  John had gone utterly still. He'd fled from his own body. Meili wrapped her arms around him, pecked him on the cheek, as if she had never meant to hurt him. As if this moment wasn't her invention, what she'd been working to create.

  "I'm sorry," Meili whispered, "I'm so sorry."

  She activated Devil's Hands, pulling them back up to the surface. Her claws throbbed a cold, heartless crimson in the dark.