If I’d thought the ambient noise of the crowd in the Colosseum was loud, the roar that went up when the first set of contestants strode out into the arena showed me the true meaning of the word. It was positively thunderous, a low rumble that built and built and built without end. It went beyond alarming and tipped over into impressive. I’d never heard anything like it.

  Forty contestants entered the arena, ten from each corner, and arranged themselves in each of the four squares, striking a series of choreographed team poses which sent the crowd even wilder. Floating cameras hovered around, flitting to and fro, searching for the best angles of their star performers. I could barely make out the announcers introducing the competing teams for the first round of the day: in the square closest to us was Menagerie, to their left was Black Metal, to their left was Vanguard, and rounding out the four groups were the towering adonises of All Brawn.

  Despite my lack of interest in this kind of sport, it was inevitable that I’d recognise some of them, such was their ubiquitous fame. Vixen stood out, one part because her name had only just come up in conversation, another part because her face was everywhere in advertisements and whatnot, but largely because her skintight orange bodysuit, complete with fox-like ears and a tail, left very little to the imagination. Her ‘team’ followed similar animal theming, though none were quite so revealing, and none jogged my memory.

  Black Metal had two recognisable figures, though not necessarily for the best of reasons: Shadow Knight and Black Hood probably would’ve preferred to be known for their feats in the arena and black metal armour that gave the group they’d co-founded its name. But my familiarity with them came from the controversy that’d spawned when they’d quit their more (in my eyes) upstanding superhero career in order to chase the money of the supercelebrity circuit. I turned my attention away from them quickly, lest they sour my mood enough to distract me from my objective here.

  I was most familiar with Vanguard as a full group. Chariot with his Roman-style armour, famous for his speed. Sunspear with his eye-searingly bright cape and legendary solar beams. Shieldmarden was a former Valkyrie, and her Norse-style armour and metallic wings were known the world over. Even their ‘lesser’ members were fairly big names: Frontline, Epoch, Trailbreaker, Quicksteel, Sentinel, Volt, and… Clawesome (by far the lamest name on the team.) They were well known for moonlighting as actual heroes on top of the arena combat thing, and I didn’t know how to feel about them.

  The less said about All Brawn the better. That group of muscle-heads were mostly known for the, ah, simplicity of their life philosophy. They were all named after gym exercises, I recalled.

  I ended up focusing my experiment on Vixen, seeing as she was the first one who’d caught my attention, and, surprisingly enough, she was one of the strongest among the competitors in this round, in terms of the Shimada Scale, according to the program guide I was flicking through. It didn’t really matter who I chose as my subject, but I figured a stronger power signal would make things easier, and most of the other higher-level competitors would be too mobile to keep track of. Vixen was more of a trickster.

  The announcer went through the rules of the game as each team huddled together, going over their strategies. Around me, I was vaguely aware that Ashika was being reluctantly drawn into conversation with someone, and Maisie was talking across me with a tone that was simultaneously teasing and threatening, presumably trying to warn off whoever was pestering Ashika. None of their words registered, because my mind was overwhelmed with trying to make sense of the various power signals that were slowly ramping up in front of me.

  It didn’t help that there were thousands more signals in the crowd. With a mass of humanity numbering in the hundreds of thousands packed this densely, it was only inevitable that plenty of them would be using their powers for little things, and they’d have no ability or reason to suppress the signal their powers produced. There was only one person in the stadium who’d be bothered by it, after all.

  Still, those forty powers out in the arena floor felt like they could’ve drowned out all 150,000 powers in the stadium—a silly thought to have, considering there were surely plenty of other powerful spectators today besides Ashika and Maisie, but I couldn’t help it; the feeling of the competitors’ signals as they ramped up in preparation for their bout was just that impressive.

  Utter chaos battered against my signal sense. Disorienting, as if something had reached in my skull and rummaged around. I grit my teeth, forcing myself to endure it. They hadn’t even started the actual fight yet. Things would only get harder from here.

  I narrowed my eyes, focusing on Vixen, trying to picture in my mind’s eye that she was the only one out there on the field. Countless nights spent daydreaming had given me a fairly strong imagination, but overwriting reality with my personal fantasy was a more trying task. Still, I did my best, holding on to that image, pretending no one else was there.

  Doing the same with my signal sense proved even more problematic, and ramped up to nigh-impossibility when the announcer started counting down from ten, the crowd bellowing along. The power signals reached a kind of crescendo, and when the count hit zero, it was all I could do to keep Vixen in my field of vision as they all burst into motion.

  Fast. That was the first word that came to mind. The pace of the ensuing battle threw off my concentration immediately, and I couldn’t help drinking in the spectacle despite myself. Nothing anyone had shown in AA’s practical test could even compare to this.

  Vanguard lived up to their name, charging ahead straight for the hill, while Menagerie and Black Metal circled around in a game of chase. All Brawn were the ones to meet Vanguard head on, contesting the hill from the off, and they put in a good showing despite their distinct lack of elaborate tactics. They were, as their name suggested, suited to feats of strength, and they didn’t beat around the bush with using it. The crowd went wild as Vanguard and All Brawn crashed into each other, quickly descending into a wild melee.

  I found myself leaning forward, part of me seeking out Vixen, but a frustrating amount of my attention captured by the fighting. I’d watched plenty of videos of this kind of thing out of morbid curiosity, but there was something different about seeing it in person. No video could convey the atmosphere. Even the most HD audio couldn’t hope to translate the noise, the feeling of 150,000 people going absolutely mad for gladiatorial combat. There was, as far as I was aware, no technology on Earth that could interpret the feeling of the clashing power signals, not least because the number of people who’d be able to appreciate it numbered in the single digits.

  What surprised me was the sound of the hits. Meaty thuds accompanied every clash between the competitors, deep and loud enough to be heard even over the crowd. Chariot rushed in and aimed a wild haymaker at one of All Brawn’s musclebound bruisers, and the bodybuilder went flying back off the hill, knocking over two of his comrades on the way. The crowd went nuts, and even from this distance I could see Chariot’s pearly grin.

  The overall battle played out similarly to that, chaotic as it was. All Brawn were strong, but they were, ultimately, a bunch of meat heads. Their brash tactics made for some great entertainment, as evidenced by the scene before me, but their brawn couldn’t match up to Vanguard’s brains. Chariot and his team worked like a well-oiled machine, always having each other backs, ready to isolate and team up on the members of All Brawn every time the opportunity arose.

  As the crowd went madder and madder for every All Brawn member knocked off of the hill, I started to suspect that the muscular madmen weren’t ever supposed to win this. They were fall guys, in a way. A warm-up to the main event. By the time Vanguard stood alone on the hill with their score ticking up, Black Metal and Menagerie had disengaged with each other with oddly perfect timing, and were ready to strike Vanguard from either side.

  I wouldn’t go as far as to call it all staged. But the timing was rather convenient.

  The thought didn’t entirely suck the fun out of it for me, but it snapped me out of my distraction enough to seek out Vixen once more. The Menagerie were now on the other side of Vanguard from us, having circled the entire arena in their ongoing battle with Black Metal; it had been somewhat of a game of keepaway, with the animal-themed ‘heroes’ chasing down the competitors in dark armour of various descriptions. Why they’d acted that way rather than going for the hill from the off, I had no idea.

  But I did know—if only peripherally due to having been distracted by the battle between Vanguard and All Brawn—that Vixen tended to skirt the edges of her team. She was running on all fours, and she currently looked remarkably like an actual fox. Actual fur had grown in to cover her body, her tail was much bushier and seemed to swish side to side on its own, and her legs were more animalistic than they had been before. Only her face remained entirely human.

  Thus, it was easy, if a little awkward for some reason, to pick her out of the crowd and focus on her once more. The power signals active in this place were already dizzying. I didn’t have the first idea how to manipulate the sense that let me feel them so much more acutely than other people did. There was no way to squint it or widen it or flare it, because it had no sensory organ.

  But I had to try, and I had to start somewhere.

  Taking note of where Vixen was on the field, I closed my eyes and plugged my ears with my fingers. Even with that, the rumble of the stadium was still distracting, the smell of soda and fried food was strong, and plugging my ears didn’t shut out the noise entirely. Still, it was something. With even a little deprivation of other senses, I was left with more attention to spare for the signals.

  I tensed in my seat, gritting my teeth. Forty strong power signals clashing together, mixing into one chaotic cacophony, was an almost painful thing to try to focus on, and the idea of trying to disentangle them and pick one out of the mess seemed almost laughable, at that moment. The best information I could gleam was that most of them were moving around, while a smaller pack were remaining relatively stationary, directly ahead of me.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  It certainly didn’t help that a power signal started building on my right, and I opened my eyes, fixing Ashika with a glare. She was looking back at me with a furrowed brow, concern in her eyes, but she held up her hands in apology when she saw my attention, falling still with a smirk. On my other side, Maisie was much more into the ongoing bout, leaning forward in her seat, riveted on the action. I rolled my eyes, took a moment to find Vixen again, then shut them once more.

  I tried directing my sense for power signals, aiming it towards the place where I last knew Vixen to have been without relying on my vision. I could tell, vaguely, that there was still a power signal coming from that direction, but it was nigh impossible to distinguish it from the thirty-nine others constantly flaring. Even so, when the signal I figured was hers moved, I tried to follow it. It turned out to be futile. She had been off to one side of the arena, taking part in some complex flanking manoeuvre with her team, and they must have rushed in to confront Vanguard head in, seeking to drive them off the hill. The signals clashed, blending together in one mad mush, and I lost any hope of tracking her.

  My eyes fell open once more, glaring at the battle. Frustration boiled within me. I took deep breaths, telling myself it was ridiculous to expect instant progress. While I’d messed around with the sense before in the past, this was essentially the first time I was truly trying to grow it with any expectation of material future results. Of course it wasn’t going to come easily.

  Telling myself that was one thing, feeling it was another. For years, I’d laboured under the weight of unfulfilled expectations, knowing myself a disappointment, even if no one would say it. The son of Valiant, powerless? After his older sister had shown such incredible potential only a few years prior? It was only because I was a minor that it hadn’t been reported everywhere, the headlines mocking my failure.

  I’d tried not to let the lack of powers get to me. I’d done my very best to believe that they’d come some day, and I’d do my best with them no matter what they turned out to be. Wherever he was now, I’d make my dad proud of me, and shut up all the people who’d looked at me with pitying eyes.

  But it was hard. There were days when I gave in to despair and spent all day in bed, accepting the ‘truth’ that I’d be a freak of nature for all my life, the only man on Earth who couldn’t even manifest a power at all. F-Rank forums held countless stories of late bloomers, and I was resigned that I’d never be able to post my own story of finally gaining powers of my own.

  As time went on, as more and more people learned of my shame, those days became more frequent. I always bounced back. There was never any way I’d give up for good. Hell, if I’d never ever gained powers at all, or somehow received confirmation that they’d never happen for me, I just would’ve found another way. Technology had come a long way with powers to study, and if I just had to be more resourceful than your average superhero, so be it.

  Obviously, that wasn’t ideal. I didn’t want to rely on the generosity of others to fulfil my dreams. My determination to make the most of matters no matter what didn’t mean I was keen to be some kind of ragtag tech ninja vigilante. Even in my darkest moments, despairing and despondent, I still wanted power.

  And now there was a path to me. It was murky and indistinct, and the one who’d showed it to me couldn’t be trusted, but it was there. Dark, but open. Tantalising. Even if powers never manifested for me in the traditional way, I knew there was something I could do. Something that was, perhaps, even unique.

  Paths. That was what Dr Shimada called our powers. In his mind, there was a set of routes unique to every person, and they whittled them down with their own will, narrowing their choices over and over until they had something uniquely suited to them.

  I was still at the start of this journey he described, and I had infinite paths before me, all of them unknown. All I had to do was take the first step.

  I just want power. Something. Anything.

  As long as it lets me walk the path I want to walk.

  There was no shift in my soul, no burst of power in my signal. Nothing about me changed whatsoever, on a physical, metaphysical, or mental level. This was no revelation. Not in the sense that power researchers described it.

  But it meant something to me, and that’s what mattered.

  My eyes drooped closed once more. This time, I didn’t focus on power signals at all. Instead, I delved back into memory, casting my mind back to the events of just a few days before. I tried to recall the feeling of Marquise’s office, the ambient noise of outside power signals cut off by the hidden isolation chamber. Usually, power signals were a constant presence, and her office, in retrospect, had ironically given me the most peace I’d felt in a long, long time.

  But that wasn’t the important part. What I wanted to recall, in the best clarity I could, was the most significant revelation I’d had since the moment I felt a power signal for the first time.

  Just the day before, I’d discovered that power signals weren’t the only things that could affect that sense. And then, somehow, I’d learned that those other things that affected my signal sense could be manipulated.

  I didn’t have the first clue how to do what she’d done. On any level. Didn’t even know where to start.

  But I had hunches about other aspects, and now it was time to put that to the test.

  Because there was more to this path than my own power. More to this mystery than signals.

  There were things in this world, surprisingly, that were even more important than my future.

  One of them was my past.

  ~~~

  I paused at the doorway, looking back at her over my shoulder. “Who were the other people, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Other people?”

  “You said you could count on one hand how many people understood how power signals feel. Who were the others?”

  Marquise raised an eyebrow. “You truly don’t know, do you? How odd.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Marquise said, “I would have thought you’d know your father had the same ability.”

  ~~~

  Clenching my jaw, I focused with all my might. The possibility of gaining power would have been enough of a motivator to keep me obsessed with power signals for months to come. But I had to admit, if I’d had a revelation and gained a power of my own just a week ago, I would have snatched it with both hands, if not for that previous, more mundane revelation.

  But knowing I was walking the same path Dad had? That changed things. Made it so I wasn’t sure if I wanted a regular power any more, not if I could bring myself closer to him, in an odd way.

  And so it was with extra motivation, wanting something perhaps more than I ever had before, that I pushed and pushed and pushed until all my attention was ahead of me, shutting out any of the ambient noise of excess signals in my surroundings. I leaned forward, eyes still shut, ears plugged once more. I would’ve pinched my nose if I had an extra hand.

  I made sure every iota of my attention was riveted on the ongoing conflict before me. Forty signals mixed together to mount a constant barrage against my signal sense, and I dug deeper into that sensation, searching for something that lay beneath the signals themselves. It was like trying to listen for a frequency the ears weren’t equipped to hear, but I persevered. There was no other choice, here.

  Casting my mind back, I sought out that lower register, the one that had affected me on a soul-deep level, both in Superverse’s power testing area and in Marquise’s office. The deeper resonance and the void that seemed to somehow fill the space around me.

  My jaw clenched tighter, grinding my teeth. My fingers dug into my ears painfully. I screwed my eyes shut so tight they ached. The signals howled and shrieked and thundered. I felt almost disconnected from my body, like I was launching my soul out into the arena, casting a net in the hopes of catching a specific power signal.

  And then, it happened. Quick as a lightning bolt, and it struck me just as powerfully. My whole soul jolted as something else, for just a moment, so brief I wasn’t sure I imagined it, crashed into my signal sense.

  The forty signals were still jumbled, but I had an idea of what I was looking for, and my sense went straight to work on finding it, moving in a trance-like state. The signal I was looking for had seven layers of resonance, each one humming at their own frequencies yet blending together into one, building on top of a rock-solid foundation.

  That foundation felt, with some instinct I couldn’t put a name to and had never been aware of before, like it was all about drawing attention, luring in curiosity with its sweet melody. On top of it came another signal, mingling with the foundation; this one sought to direct that attention, honing the melody so it could come from a different direction at will. A third blended with the second, granting the foundation a new pitch, perhaps letting it manipulate that attention, plucking emotional strings. The fourth added a completely new frequency that rested atop the foundation and its two modifiers, complimenting them in a new and different way with more weight to it, this one all about change and transformation. The fifth was—

  A lance of icy pain spiked through my skull, shocking me out of concentration. I hissed, my eyes snapping open as the hands over my ears immediately moved to massage my forehead, where the pain was most severe. The light in the stadium was suddenly too bright, and I could feel my pulse pounding in my skull. The noise had already been thunderous, but now it felt like it was shaking my very bones, rattling my already-sore skull.

  I winced, sinking down in my chair. The battle in the arena was still ongoing. Black Metal had taken the hill at some point, though they only had one members scoring points while the others circled, trying to keep All Brawn at bay while the Menagerie and Vanguard were regrouping.

  The migraine coming on promised to be a painful one. My soul was like a sore thumb already—I really needed to come up with a better name for whatever the hell it was that got all sore when something messed with my signal sense to the point of it being painful—and it would only get worse if I took this any further. Really, the best course of action was to let Maisie and Ashika know I wasn’t feeling good and head on home.

  I snorted.

  Not a goddamn chance.

  Despite the pain, a grin made its way onto my face. There was no way I could go home now, not with the breakthrough I’d just had. Even if it was only for a moment, I’d done something I’d never been able to do before with my signal sense. I’d grown. Seen tangible improvement.

  Now, I had to see what else I could do.

  Discord :)