190 Updated Power Ratings
190 Updated Power Ratings
I stood in the middle of a wrecked office, glass and metal strewn across the floor like shed skin. The giant monitor that had once dominated the room was shattered into jagged pieces, its surface fractured beyond recognition. Static buzzed through the air, sharp and irritating, and though the face that usually occupied the screen was gone, the machine was still barely functional. Lines of light flickered weakly through the cracks as if it refused to die quietly.
“I wish to make a business arrangement with you,” the Monitor said, its voice distorted but unmistakably composed. “There is a traitor among my employees, and I wish to acquire your services to identify and remove them.”
I crossed my arms and stared at the broken screen, unmoved by the offer. The Monitor continued before I could respond, its tone shifting into something that almost resembled regret. “It is unfortunate that we must give up on Markend,” it added, “but I hope this does not preclude future dealings between us.”
Looking through Funeral Homes would have been significantly harder if it weren’t for George. Once he learned about Nicole’s involvement, he dropped everything else and focused on her trail with unsettling efficiency. By correlating her movements, kills, and periods of silence, he deduced the base of operations Funeral Homes had been using. From there, everything unraveled faster than they could adapt.
I stepped closer to the monitor and began reciting names calmly. “Tanya Morkisten. Kristen Hera. Lena C. Aura. Stephanie Lee. Gina B. Ulysses. Marcy Gomez,” I said, letting the silence stretch between each name. “Wives, daughters, mistresses, and family members of the board of directors of Fregene Group.”
I leaned in slightly, my reflection fractured in the cracked surface. “Stick to your business,” I warned, my voice low and even. “Or you might find me visiting your families by myself.”
I stomped down hard on the machine, crushing what little functionality it had left. The static died instantly, leaving the office in absolute silence. It only took a couple of days after that to uproot the organization as thoroughly as I could manage.
Toward the end, I required help from Marker, but nothing had spiraled out of control. What concerned me more was the attention it drew, the ripples spreading outward as power structures collapsed.
I phased into the ground and escaped through the sewers, making sure no one sighted me on the way out. If I had a choice, I would never use the sewers for escape. They were cramped, unforgiving, and the stench clung no matter how much I phased through the filth. After gaining enough distance, I phased upward and emerged back at ground level, breathing in air that felt only marginally cleaner.
A drizzle had started by then, thin rain tapping against the pavement. Weather in Markend had never been kind, but lately it felt especially hostile, as if the city itself was fraying. Waiting for me just around the bend was a limo, its dark silhouette blending into the dusk. I phased the rain and sewer grime off myself, but the feeling of uncleanliness lingered stubbornly.
The driver glanced at me through the rearview mirror. “Where to?”
“BunnyLabs,” I replied as I settled in.
I pulled out my phone and called George, not bothering with pleasantries. “I’m done,” I said. “I want to move that appointment now.”
His exaggerated sigh came through loud and clear. “You always do this,” he complained, though there was relief under the irritation. “Fine. I’ll be waiting.”
As the limo moved through the city, my thoughts drifted to my power ratings and where I might stand by SRC standards. Chronologically, my abilities ranged across intangibility, enhancer, empathy, electrokinesis, telepathy, biokinesis, and chronokinesis. Each one had grown sharper over time, less restrained, and I wasn’t sure whether that should have reassured or worried me.
The limo slowed to a stop, and the driver spoke again, his tone professional and detached. “We’re here.”
A pretty woman was waiting just outside when I stepped out of the limo, standing straight with practiced composure and a smile that felt a little too rehearsed. Her eyes flicked over me briefly before she gestured toward the building. I followed without comment, my footsteps echoing softly as she led me through sterile corridors and into a private room tucked away from the rest of BunnyLabs.
She gestured toward a neatly arranged set of clothes laid out on a bench. “Please make yourself comfortable,” she said smoothly. “You can clean yourself up here.”
I glanced down at myself instinctively, wondering if there was still any trace of the sewer clinging to me. I didn’t smell anything, and I doubted there was anything left after all the phasing, but George had always been dramatic about these things. “I’m fine,” I muttered under my breath, more to myself than her.
She lingered near the door instead of leaving, shifting her weight slightly. “If you’d like,” she added, a little too eagerly, “I could join you.”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’m fine on my own,” I said flatly, not looking at her.
She nodded, hiding her disappointment poorly, and finally stepped outside. I took a hot shower, letting the water beat against my skin longer than necessary as my thoughts drifted without direction. Afterward, I changed into the fresh clothes, the fabric unfamiliar but comfortable enough, and stepped back out into the room. She was still there, waiting as if she hadn’t moved an inch.
“Could I get a quick snack?” I asked, my stomach reminding me how long it had been since I’d eaten properly. “Also, the gear I left behind… Please tell George to see to it…”
“Of course,” she replied immediately, her smile returning as she guided me toward the cafeteria.
There were too many things occupying my mind lately, piling on top of one another without any clear order. I had no idea how to handle them individually, let alone together. Still, we had a goal in mind, and we were going to see it through. For now, that had to be enough.
When I finished eating, I pushed the tray aside and stood up. “You can leave me alone now,” I told her calmly. “I know the way.”
She hesitated, then inclined her head respectfully. “It was an honor to attend you,” she said before turning and walking away. I felt her disappointment through Empathy as she left, sharp and unhidden, but I ignored it and continued down the hallway.
“George,” I called out aloud, my voice carrying slightly in the empty corridor. “What was that about?”
The lights flickered for a split second before George appeared beside me, materializing from the CCTV feed with a faint hum. “It wasn’t my intention to displease you,” he said quickly.
“Get straight to the point,” I replied, not slowing my pace.
George walked beside me, his expression troubled, but he danced around the issue anyway. “Some of my employees are simply too eager to please,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “Of course, there loyalty to me is unquestionable. See, this are people I lifted from harsh times. They are hungry for my acknowledgement…”
I stopped and turned to face him. “You didn’t tell that employee of yours to seduce me or sleep with me, did you?”
He sighed deeply, shoulders slumping. “What use is there for me to lie in front of a mind reader?” he asked. “You might as well read my mind.”
“I wouldn’t do that to a friend,” I shot back, my tone sharper than I intended.
We resumed walking and stopped before a set of giant double doors. George stepped forward and pressed a series of buttons on the panel beside them, the mechanisms humming softly as he continued to talk. “I’m not blind,” he said quietly. “I know for a fact that you’ve been shagging Amelia, and I also know you just shagged that lass, Nicole.”
I clenched my jaw. “If you’re going to give me relationship advice,” I said, “then there was no need for you to tell your employee to sleep with me.”
George glanced at me sideways as the doors began to unlock. “I had to make sure you weren’t just being horny and thinking with your dick,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Because if that was the case, I’d happily throw women your way and spoil you.”
The doors slid open with a low mechanical hum, revealing the testing chamber beyond, all white panels and embedded machinery humming quietly beneath the surface. George stepped forward beside me, his voice continuing as if the transition hadn’t interrupted his thoughts at all.
“I owe you my life,” he said plainly, turning his head just enough to look at me. “I’d willingly name you my successor for the company without hesitation. And if making you happy is part of that responsibility, then I’d gladly send women your way and spoil you rotten if that’s what it takes.”
I shook my head and exhaled slowly as I stepped into the room. “It’s not like that,” I said, keeping my tone controlled.
George stopped and looked at me fully this time, brows knitting together. “If you’re not shagging women for the fun of it,” he asked rhetorically, “then what exactly are you doing?”
I didn’t answer him right away, and the silence stretched just long enough for the question to settle uncomfortably deep. Relationships had always been complicated and irritating, far more trouble than they were worth. I cared for Nicole, and I cared for Amelia, but if I was honest with myself, I cared more about Nicole. From a broader perspective, stripped of excuses and sentimentality, I had been using Amelia as a way to vent, as a second option, and as a convenient tool to advance my agenda. It wasn’t something I could ever say out loud. I might have been a piece of shit, but even I had lines shaped by vanity. I couldn’t tell Amelia to her face that I was using her, even though my mouth had been loose enough with Nicole, insulting her and telling her to get out of my life. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me.
George broke the silence gently. “Human relationships aren’t easy,” he said. “But you should at least try to explain. Maybe start with Nicole.”
“I’m not explaining anything,” I replied flatly. “We’re here to do what we came for.”
George gave a theatrical cough, clearly shelving the conversation for later. “Fine,” he said, clapping his hands once. “There are a total of seven power classifications in your case, and each one requires specific tools for accurate rating.”
He gestured for me to step closer to the apparatus at the center of the room, its surface unfolding as it activated. “Before we rate them individually,” he continued, “I want to identify your primary power first. From there, we’ll deduce the secondary and tertiary.”
“It’s obviously intangibility, but fine.”
I rolled up my sleeve without comment as he drew blood with practiced efficiency, transferring the sample into a strange device clearly designed for capes. The machine pulsed faintly as it began its analysis, lights shifting in deliberate patterns as data streamed across a holographic display.
A cape would pull a power, and that power was known as the primary. It formed the core basis of a cape’s power system, the foundation from which most other abilities were derived. A primary typically represented anywhere from fifty-one percent to ninety-nine percent of a cape’s total power expression. A secondary referred to the next most prominent ability, usually below fifty percent in expression, while a tertiary described any derived or auxiliary power with less than one percent expression.
George stared at the results as they populated the screen, his expression shifting from curiosity to disbelief. “That’s impossible,” he muttered, leaning closer.
“What?” I asked, already bracing myself.
George straightened abruptly and looked at me with wide eyes. “You don’t have a secondary at all!”
“What do you mean I don’t have a secondary?” I asked, turning toward George as the machines continued their low hum. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
George didn’t answer immediately. He waved me closer and projected the results into the air between us, the data stabilizing into clear lines of text. “Look for yourself,” he said.
I stared at the numbers, my expression tightening as I read them out loud despite myself. “Intangibility, ninety-nine percent. Enhancer, zero point one eight percent. Empathy, zero point four two percent. Electrokinesis, zero point zero seven percent. Telepathy, zero point one four percent. Biokinesis, zero point zero eight percent. Chronokinesis, zero point one one percent.”
George nodded grimly. “The total is a hundred percent exactly,” he said. “There should be at least a one percent margin of error. That’s the part that makes this strange.”
I looked back at him. “You’re saying everything else I have is tertiary and that’s a problem?”
“Yes,” George replied. “Most capes develop a secondary that complements the primary. That secondary allows hybrid abilities to emerge naturally. What you’ve been doing looks like hybridization, but it isn’t.”
I crossed my arms and exhaled. “What I do is combine techniques,” I said. “I synchronize timing, output, and control from different powers and force them into synergy. That’s not the same thing as a true hybrid power.”
George’s eyes narrowed slightly in thought. “Exactly,” he said. “A real hybrid power is born as a single expression.”
“Like Light,” I continued. “His elementalization came from electrokinesis, intangibility, and speedster ratings merging into one power. That wasn’t technique. That was structural.”
Power development was a vast field with more unanswered questions than proven theories. Hybrid powers, especially, were poorly understood. Among psychic kinetic class capes, achieving elementalization was the stuff of legend, a pipe dream most researchers dismissed outright. It happened through chance, circumstance, and genetic lottery rather than effort. Even someone like me couldn’t brute-force their way into it. What I had instead was potency. A ninety-nine percent primary in intangibility meant the ceiling of that power was absurdly high. Witch was said to have possessed a ninety-nine percent telepathy rating herself, with minor traces of empathy and hypnosis that never manifested in practice. Potential mattered more than versatility in the long run.
George folded his arms as he studied the display. “Most powers that show up in blood tests are dormant,” he said. “Potential expressions that may or may not ever awaken. Yours are different.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You’ve already manifested everything,” he replied. “You could still awaken new abilities in the future, but they’d split percentage from the tertiary pool. That would weaken all of them further.”
I frowned. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t derive more powers.”
“I’m strongly advising against it,” George said. “You’d be harming your own growth.”
I considered that for a moment before asking, “Is it possible to reduce my powers?”
George blinked. “Reduce them?”
“Yes,” I said. “Strip some of it away.”
He shook his head slowly. “That’s unheard of,” he admitted. “But if an anti-power potion exists, then in theory, we could try.”
I didn’t respond, and he seemed to take that as a cue to move on. “Let’s get the actual ratings,” he said, gesturing toward the apparatus. “Potential and performance aren’t the same.”
The tests began immediately. For intangibility, I was instructed to phase through a reinforced wall repeatedly while sensors tracked resistance and stability. For enhancer, they forcibly induced a sleep state and scanned neural reinforcement patterns. For empathy, I was placed in front of an artificial brain and made to speak while typing out the emotions it projected. For electrokinesis, I blasted a reinforced pillar again and again until the readings stabilized. For telepathy, I was ordered to induce migraines in multiple artificial brains under controlled parameters. For biokinesis, I was submerged in a strange viscous liquid that reacted to cellular manipulation. For chronokinesis, I was made to halt a falling ball mid-air while time distortion was measured.
When it was over, George studied the final results in silence before reading them aloud.
“Intangibility, sixteen. Enhancer, eight. Empathy, eleven. Electrokinesis, six. Telepathy, eight. Biokinesis, five. Chronokinesis, four.”