"Ten times as strong," Armsmaster said. "Impressive."

Unlike the others, he'd been nothing but professional with me. He hadn't shown any resentment that I'd caused his Halberd to be destroyed, or that I'd caused him to be burned on the face where his armor didn't cover.

I was strong enough now to lift a submarine into the air, which in the normal course of events was more than strong enough for anything I'd need to do. How much stronger could I possibly need to get.

"Alexandria is less than five hundred times as strong as you are now," he said. "Should you continue on your current course and not get yourself killed, you will outstrip her eventually."

"Assuming anyone wants to talk to me," I said glumly.

There had been a time that the other Wards had feared me; now they were ostracizing me, all except Sophia. She'd managed to shadow out of the way of the gobbets of burning metal, and so hadn't been injured like the others had been.

"Give them time," he said. "Teenagers can be difficult. My own school life wasn't idyllic. I hadn't found my path yet, and I didn't know how to relate to people my own age. There was a certain amount of cruelty involved."

"That's the problem," I said. "I know what path I have to take, and it seems like I have to take it alone."

"Do you?" he asked. "Haven't you thought about how to synergize the others powers with your own?"

"What, like having Vista stretch my punches to hit people far away?" I asked. "I have my Ki blasts for distance attacks."

"And against someone immune?" he asked. "The problem with parahuman powers is that they tend to be like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, in which one power beats another, but is beaten in turn by a third power."

I frowned.

"Against a Master, you might have difficult time," Armsmaster said. "Especially someone like Heartbreaker or the Simurgh. Even a tinker might be able to come up with countermeasures to deal with you."

I nodded. I suspected that Armsmaster had been working on countermeasures to deal with me.

"Who would be the most dangerous Wards for you to deal with?" Armsmaster asked.

"Clockblocker," I said. "If he lost any sense of mercy. He could string fishing line that would be almost invisible, and time lock it; he could decapitate someone if he wanted to. Defensively, he could shut almost anyone down if he could reach them."

He nodded. "And how could he be more effective without mutilating people?"

"He could have Vista change space to give him a distance attack," I said. "He could use pieces of paper as stairs to move to a higher vantage point. He could even use silly string. There's a lot of things he could do to be more effective if he wanted to."

"And Sophia?"

"Tinkertech so she can see where the electrical lines are," I said. "And maybe a visor to see where people are. Short of that, I could point out where people were with my Ki sense and have her phase tranquilizer bolts through walls before they ever have a chance to even know we are there."

"Vista?"

"Tough... she's already good with her power. I might give her containment foam grenades; she could hand deliver them right next to people's feet."

"If you are this good at figuring out how to use others' powers, why aren't you more creative with yours?"

I shrugged. "I've promised to try. It's just... my powers seem to be so simple. I've focused on increasing their power because that's the most obvious application."

"You've already proven that you can create light. Try other applications, preferably non-lethal ones. The last thing we need is a trail of corpses around a hero who is a minor."

I nodded. I had a few ideas already; it might be possible to move Ki. What if I could actually drain the Ki from others, or lend mine to them? Could I create a Ki attack with a smaller edge, maybe to create a cutting attack?

If I could create light, did that mean that I could create illusions? Could I use it like the Force and create telekinetic effects? That was sort of what I was doing when I was flying anyway? Why was affecting my own body any different than affecting other objects?

Could I absorb other kinds of energy? Could I extend the force field I surrounded myself with to protect others?

Until I tried, I wouldn't know what was possible and what was impossible. I'd have to try a lot of things, and probably fail at a lot of them before I got things right.

Everyone was disappointed in me, which meant that I couldn't continue doing as I had been. Even if I could simply push my way through to overpower my opponents, it wouldn't help me save hostages or stop Bonesaw from releasing a world ending pathogen into the air. Only strategy was going to accomplish that.

"I'm going to want some training in tactics," I said. "It's probably even more important than the fighting training I've been doing."

He nodded. "I doubt you'll have many problems with most opponents; few capes can lift more than three thousand tons, and even Alexandria can't without having the whole thing collapse on itself."

"I can't just drop boats on people's heads," I said. "There's some things I want to try, but I haven't worked out the kinks yet."

He nodded curtly.

From anyone else I would have thought that meant he was judging me; from Armsmaster it meant business as usual. He was professional to the very end, even if I'd heard whispers that he was something of a glory hound.

"You've made some mistakes," he said. "But I was the one who approved your dropping of the cars on Ash Beast. I should have anticipated the likely chemical processes that resulted. For that I apologize."

So that's why he was so much less judgmental than the others. He felt guilty too.

"However, assuming that you can throw yourself into a dangerous situation without knowing whether it is true or not... that is also something that I should have trained out of you. For my failures in not teaching you caution, I apologize."

Somehow, his apology made me feel worse than the judgment and censure from some of my colleagues.

"You and Sophia will be going to weekend training sessions with Alexandria, with special focus on teamwork, tactics and strategy, and knowing when to retreat."

"Why Sophia?" I asked.

"She needs remedial training with teamwork almost as much as you do," he admitted. "She doesn't gel well with the rest of the team, and part of that is that she resents being forced to be here. She seems to have a certain degree of admiration for you though."

"So if it's what the cool kids are doing, you think she might go along," I said dryly.

The strange part was that it wasn't a bad plan, assuming Sophia's tolerance of me wasn't just part of some convoluted long term plan to bully me some more.

Of course, if that happened I doubt she'd enjoy the aftermath much. I'd make sure of it.

Given my speed and abilities, it'd be ridiculously easy for me to get rid of a body in the middle of the ocean and be back before anyone noticed. I'd just have to wait for a cloudy day, when Dragon's satellites would have a harder time following me.

Not that I'd kill her, really. It was just pleasant to think about sometimes, doing things to my bullies. I'd imagined it back before I'd realized I had power. I'd imagined having Alexandria's powers and being able to drop people into space or something.

By people, of course, I meant Emma.

Of course, now I realized that the best revenge against Emma would be for her to realize just exactly who and what I am. Her knowing that I had power that she never would, powers that she'd dreamed of when she was younger would be perfect.

Not that I could tell her, not with Dad still vulnerable. Of course, Armsmaster told me he was now able to lift wights in the fifteen ton range, and bullets weren't likely to be more than an annoyance to him. Still, there were enough parahumans who would be happy to attack us at home even though it would be suicide for them and whoever they worked for.

Sophia seemed to be sincere, but I'd learned not to fully trust anyone, no matter how nice they seemed. Even now, the nicer version of Sophia wasn't a particularly good person. She was nicer to me, but how that fit into her warped version of a social hierarchy I wasn't sure.

She seemed to think that it was the right of the people on top to push those on the bottom even further down. When I'd been at the bottom, it had been terrible. Now that I was above her, she acted very differently.

If I dropped to the bottom again would she change her behavior toward me again? Had she really thought I was weak before, and she now respected me, or was she simply acting nicer for fear that I would lose patience with her and blast her into atoms.

I wondered if the Protectorate had scanners good enough to detect when you fully disintegrated someone. Unfortunately any blast strong enough to do that would also vaporize the wall behind and probably several others as well.

I'd read somewhere that it took 3 gigajoules to disintegrate a human body... and the standard lighting bolt had one percent of that energy. Of course, to vaporize an entire human it would have to cover their entire body, which would require sixty thousand times as much power. I had no doubt that I could output that much energy if I wanted to, although possibly not in one blast. Making the energy stop...

Could I?

Could I create a ball of energy that would seek people out, turn corners and stop on command? That would be a lot more useful than standard blasts.

My problem before had been one of perspective. I'd decided that my power was simple and there wasn't anything to do with it that was innovative, and because of that I hadn't done anything innovative other than my light blast.

Armsmaster stared at me for a moment, then dismissed me. I wondered if I looked like I was in a Tinker fugue. I had all these ideas for ways to use my powers, and no idea about how to even try to do some of these things. I could ask my Dad for advice, but I suspected that the innovators in our family had been the ones who'd been killed early.

Their innovations had doubtlessly died with them, while the more conservative members had been the ones to survive. Did that mean that we were domesticated, like that experiment on a fox farm in Russia. They'd let the friendliest foxes survive and breed, and the meaner foxes had been turned into coats.

Within ten generations changes had been seen, and within forty generations they had foxes who wagged their tails whenever humans would appear with floppy ears and changes in their fur and shapes of their skulls.

If my urge for battle was this strong, how bad had it been for my ancestors? Had they been lucky to survive childhood? I could imagine a four year old charging a bear and being killed in the old west very easily.

In France it would have been wild boars, or poor people, or whatever they had back in the middle ages when they weren't dying from the plague.

Sometimes I wondered if my education wasn't what it should be. It wasn't like Winslow really cared whether we knew a lot about history or politics or anything. It wasn't like any of us was expected to succeed as anything other than a fast food worker or drug dealer.

Mom would have been disappointed. Things I was interested in I knew a great deal about. Other things... not so much.

As I walked through the Rig, I noticed that the PRT agents were all giving me a wide berth. They were looking at me when they thought I wasn't looking, and they were whispering among my heads.

I might have worried that they were planning to fire me, but I knew that I was too important for them to do that. The PRT and Protectorate were cynical and pragmatic; they'd prefer a powerful bad person on their side than a weak good one.

Still, I'd have to work hard to change people's opinions of me. They thought I was a loose cannon, and dangerous, and the only way to overcome that opinion was to perform well over and over until all of this was a bad memory.

Alexandria's camp wasn't in Los Angeles.

I should have known; the kind of damage we could do to the landscape wasn't something that needed to be anywhere near a city of millions of people. Instead we were in Nevada in the desert.

Sophia was visibly sweating, even though I wasn't. She looked over at me with an annoyed look, and I grinned at her.

Alexandria strode out of a bunker and stared at us.

"This isn't the Army," she said. "Or the Air Force, or the Marines. They can enforce discipline, because each person has to be a cog in a machine. Cogs can be replaced, and each person knows that they are only as valuable as they are useful."

There were only ten of us, a much smaller group than I would have thought coming from Protectorate and Ward groups from all across the United States. There weren't enough of us to form several rows, and so we were lined up in a single rows.

We were all dressed in Army camouflage; a T-shirt and belt the color of sand, tan boots, and camouflage colored pants. No one was wearing hats, but everyone was wearing tiny domino masks that didn't really conceal anyone's features. I wondered why anyone would bother?

If a news person or villain came here and took pictures, it would be easy to find out who we were, which was probably why the location of this place was top secret. My Ki sense reached out three hundred miles now, and I couldn't detect anyone in a hundred mile radius.

With a map or Internet I could have probably figured out where we were from the towns I could detect further away, but none of that worked here. Whether it was because the network didn't reach or because they were jamming us I did not know.

"Unfortunately, each parahuman is one of a kind. No parahuman can exactly replace another, because no parahuman is exactly the same. That tends to make us an arrogant bunch. We think that because we are unique, because we are needed, that we are special."

Alexandria leaned forward.

"We ARE Special, but that doesn't mean that we're better than ordinary people. We won a lottery that gives us great power while giving us terrible traumas that makes us more unstable than everyone else. We are better than them, but we are worse than them at the same time."

None of us said anything. We stood at attention, despite the sweat rolling down most of their faces.

"Each one of you is here because you've made mistakes. Sometimes these were terrible mistakes that got people killed. Other times you only hurt yourselves. All of you lack the simple discipline that makes every Marine, Army, Navy man better than you. What do you think they would do with these powers you so value?"

She strode back and forth. "I can tell you what they'd do. They'd change the world."

"There's a difference between what I can do and what the Army can do. They can make you shave your heads, shave your beards... I can't do that because it could jeopardize secret identities."

I felt some of the others shift. There was a sort of smugness in the way they were standing, a defiance even in front of Alexandria herself. They probably thought they were being brave; I knew they were being stupid.

Sophia glanced at me uncertainly, and I gave her a tiny shake of my head.

The Protectorate wouldn't have given Alexandria this job unless she was good at it, and she wouldn't be good at it if she couldn't do anything to us.

"Of course, in the actual Army, all they can do is shout at you," Alexandria said. "But the contracts you signed are a little different. They give me authority to do things that would never ever be allowed in the actual Army."

She turned to me.

"Cadet Sparta," she said.

I stiffened and tried to remember if I was standing correctly.

"People tell me you think you are strong. The strongest Cape in Brockton Bay. I'm here to tell you that Brockton Bay isn't shit."

A moment later she backhanded me, and the world exploded as I flew backward toward one of the Adobe barracks behind us. The entire building collapsed as I flew through it, and I found myself buried in the hillside behind it.

It took me a moment to get over the ringing in my ears as I shoved my way out of tons of dirt.

"You aren't humans here, and you won't be treated like humans until you prove that you deserve to be."

Although she never raised her voice, it still carried. The others look shocked as I staggered back into line. Everyone knew I was a minor, and if she was willing to hit me, then all bets were off.

"Welcome to hell," Alexandria said.