Chapter 232: 232 | The Suboptimal Field
The alarm went off at four-fifteen, and for the first time since arriving in this body, I didn’t hate the sound.
Diane’s voice echoed in my skull from last night’s phone call. Nobody knows what they’re doing. The ones who look confident are just better at the performance. She’d said it with the casual authority of someone who’d built a media empire on the principle, and I’d spent the remaining hours before sleep turning the words over like a coin I couldn’t decide whether to pocket or spend.
The ready part comes later. You start while you’re terrified and figure out the readiness on the way.
I was done waiting to feel ready.
My feet hit the floor at four-sixteen. The Demigod trait had done its overnight work again, the kind of passive physical optimization that meant I woke up feeling like I’d already finished a warm-up rather than just dragged myself out of unconsciousness.
My reflection in the bathroom mirror looked slightly different than it had twenty-four hours ago. Shoulders a fraction broader. Jaw a touch more defined.
The kind of incremental changes that no single person would notice on any given day but that accumulated into something undeniable over weeks.
I splashed water on my face and pulled on the navy Halloran compression shirt and matching shorts that Steele’s bulletin board notice had specified, laced my training shoes, and headed for the door.
The hallway was dead quiet at four-twenty. Most of 1-B wouldn’t surface until at least six-thirty, when Steele’s conditioning drills officially began. I had seventy minutes of private time, which was exactly what I needed, because today I wasn’t going to the conditioning field.
Today I was going somewhere I could actually test what this body could do without twenty classmates and an A-ranked instructor cataloguing every inconsistency.
The campus at four-twenty in the morning felt like a different country from the version that existed during daylight hours. No students. No parents. No faculty visible on the main paths.
Just the soft hiss of automatic sprinklers hitting the athletic fields and the faint orange glow of security lighting along the covered walkways.
I moved through it with the easy speed of someone whose hundred-point Agility made jogging feel like standing still, my footsteps barely audible on the concrete.
The eucalyptus trees lining the residential path smelled sharp and clean in the pre-dawn air, and somewhere in the distance a bird that didn’t know it was supposed to wait for sunrise was already making noise about something.
I headed north, past the Academic Spine and the Combat Training District, toward the far edge of campus where Percy’s obsessive mapping had identified an isolated section of grounds that the student body rarely used.
A secondary training field, Field Zeta, sat behind a grove of oak trees and a maintenance shed, technically available for student use but separated enough from the primary facilities that casual observers couldn’t see it from any of the main walkways.
Percy had noted it in his notebook as "suboptimal location for scheduled activities but ideal for unsupervised individual work" and circled it twice.
I loved that kid.
Field Zeta turned out to be smaller than Epsilon, roughly half the size, with grass that needed cutting and lane markings that had faded to ghosts of their former paint. The bleachers were rusted at the joints.
The equipment rack held three medicine balls and a tire that someone had abandoned there long enough ago for weeds to grow through the rim. No cameras that I could identify, which was the point. No witnesses, which was also the point.
I stood in the center of the field with the sky turning from black to deep blue above me and the first hint of grey light touching the eastern horizon.
My breath came out in small clouds despite the California warmth, a side effect of the Demigod trait running my metabolism at rates that made normal body temperature slightly elevated compared to baseline humans.
Okay. Let’s find out what we can actually do.
I started with Spectral Reach because it was the ability I’d had longest and understood best. Four amber constructs materialized from my back, the phantom limbs extending outward in a spread that covered roughly fifteen feet in every direction.
At full extension they looked like wings made of solidified light, translucent enough to see through but solid enough to interact with physical objects. I’d been using these for three months now, but always with restraint.
Always at the level a mid-tier Channeler would be expected to operate at. Always holding back because someone might be watching.
Nobody was watching.
I grabbed one of the medicine balls from the rack with two constructs and hurled it straight up. The ball rocketed into the sky like a fastball from a cannon, climbing until it was a speck against the lightening blue, then arced and came back down. I caught it with a third construct six inches from the ground, the amber limb absorbing the impact with zero strain.
That was different.
At fifty percent output, which was what I’d been demonstrating for Steele and the cohort, the medicine ball would have reached maybe thirty feet. At full output, I’d just sent it past the height of the maintenance shed’s roof and possibly higher. The construct that caught it hadn’t even flickered.
I spent the next twenty minutes pushing the boundaries I’d been pretending didn’t exist. Lifting the abandoned tire, which weighed at least two hundred pounds, with a single construct.
Manipulating all four constructs independently, each one performing a different task simultaneously. Two holding objects aloft while one threaded through the bleacher supports like a snake and the fourth maintained a defensive screen behind me.
My brain processed the parallel inputs without stuttering, the hundred-point Intelligence handling the multitasking load like a computer running four applications at once while the hundred-point Dexterity ensured each construct moved with the kind of control that made surgeons jealous.
This is what I actually look like. Not the version I’ve been selling.
