The alarm shrieked like a dying animal.
Mateo jolted upright, his body protesting every movement. Around him, chaos erupted as six teenage boys scrambled to consciousness in various states of panic.
Henrik's wrist blade sang from its sheath before his eyes were fully open, the sharp steel catching the harsh fluorescent light. "Attack?" he barked, scanning the room like a cornered animal.
Ken. No, Switch dropped into a combat stance, his own knife materializing in his grip. His movements were controlled but ready—someone who'd learned to wake up prepared for trouble.
The contrast was stark. Ben groaned and rolled over, trying to bury his head under his pillow. Anon sat up peacefully, adjusting his glasses with the calm of someone who'd never been woken by explosions in the night.
But the fire-powered guy simply sat up on his bottom bunk, red hair still perfectly styled despite sleep. No panic. No weapons. Just the controlled awareness of someone trained for this exact scenario.
Rich hero family, Mateo concluded, filing away the observation. Probably been doing emergency drills since he could walk.
The alarm cut off abruptly.
"Wake up, heroes of Atlas Academy." Commander Reeves' voice crackled through the intercom, sharp and unforgiving. "Your second day of training starts now."
Henrik's blade retracted with a snick, tension bleeding from his shoulders. "Hell of a wake-up call."
"Schedule's posted on the wall," Reeves continued. "Training center, 0730 hours. Don't be late."
Switch was already at the wall, reading aloud: "0700 to 0715, hygiene and prep. 0715 to 0730, breakfast. 0730 to 1500, combat and quirk training." He paused, checking his phone. "It's 0707. We've got eight minutes."
Everyone groaned except Mateo and Fire. While the others complained, Mateo grabbed his spare shirt—then stopped. Six sets of black uniforms lay folded at the foot of each bunk, crisp and clearly tailored.
"Academy colors," Anon observed, holding up the smallest set with a slight blush. "They must have measured us yesterday."
Mateo snatched his size and scanned the rest of the schedule. Training until 1500. One hour rest. Then—his jaw tightened—"Even More Training" from 1600 to 2300.
Eight hours of sleep. Sixteen hours of hell. For six more days.
Then the real war starts.
He rushed to the bathrooms, the mirrors nothing like the cracked, warped glass in his old apartment. Mateo stared at his reflection: black uniform with three green stripes that matched his eyes, the AA logo emblazoned across his back and his left breast pocket.
Two days ago, he'd been nobody. A failure who couldn't even get into Altas on his own merit. Now he wore the colors of the most elite academy in the world.
So why did he still feel hollow inside?
"You planning to admire yourself all morning?" Fire's voice cut through his thoughts like a blade. The redhead stood behind him, uniform immaculate, expression cold as winter steel.
"Just—"
"Save it. You'll be late for training, and Reeves doesn't strike me as the forgiving type."
Mateo wanted to argue, but he was already walking away, dismissing him like he wasn't worth the effort. The casual arrogance stung more than any insult could have.
Breakfast was a blur of tasteless chicken and rice wolfed down too quickly. Mateo barely registered the flavors, his mind racing ahead to what the day might bring. More tests? More ways to fail? More opportunities to prove he didn't belong here?
The training center doors opened onto a compound that stole his breath away. Open sky stretched endlessly above them, clouds close enough to touch. Far below, the city sprawled like a child's toy set, people moving like ants through streets that looked drawn with a ruler.
Still can't believe this place floats.
"No time for sightseeing," Commander Reeves snapped, though she'd appeared beside him so quietly he jumped. Her pale eyes held no warmth, only the sharp focus of someone who'd seen too much war. "Form up. We have work to do."
Class B assembled in a ragged line, some still blinking sleep from their eyes. The morning air carried a bite that cut through the fabric of their uniforms, raising goosebumps along Mateo's arms.
Reeves studied them like a predator evaluating prey. When she spoke, each word carried the weight of absolute authority.
"Time is the one resource we cannot afford to waste. Yesterday's test showed us your raw potential. Today, we begin forging that potential into something useful." Her gaze swept across them, lingering on each face. "Your quirks are tools—currently dull, unfocused tools that wouldn't last five minutes in a real combat zone. We're going to change that."
The training compound spread before them like a military obstacle course designed by someone with an active imagination and no concept of mercy. Massive concrete slabs sat waiting to be moved. Steel beams hung from mechanical arms. Target dummies lined one wall, their surfaces already scorched and dented from previous sessions.
"Pair off and find your stations," Reeves commanded, her voice cutting through the morning air. "Today we push past your comfort zones. Yesterday showed us what you can do when desperate. Today we make that desperation obsolete."
Mateo found himself assigned to what looked like a medieval torture device—two steel posts with a horizontal bar suspended twenty feet above the ground. A simple pull-up bar, if you ignored the fact that normal people couldn't reach it.
"Extended reach training," Reeves explained, appearing at his shoulder with that uncanny stealth of hers. "Show me what you learned yesterday."
Mateo forced a slime tendril from his right hand, the green substance stretching upward to wrap around the bar. The tingle ran unnaturally through his arm as his pores dilated, releasing the viscous fluid that had defined his quirk.
He pulled himself up using his arms, the slime acting as nothing more than a rope.
"No." Reeves' voice was sharp enough to cut steel. "Not with your arms, Mateo. We already know you're physically strong. This exercise is supposed to challenge your quirk's strength."
Mateo glared at her, then at the tendril connecting him to the bar. "So, what do you want me to do?"
"I want you to pull yourself up with your power, not your muscles. I won't explain how—that's for you to figure out."
Around him, the others had begun their own training regimens. Alex stood before a boulder the size of a small car, her dark hair pulled back in the same neat ponytail from yesterday. She extended her arm, and the massive rock slid backward as if pushed by an invisible giant. Then she clenched her fist as the boulder rolled forward again.
Push and pull, Mateo realized, watching the precise control in her movements. But only in one direction—wherever her arm points.
Ben stood in what looked like a shooting gallery from hell. Automated turrets fired rubber bullets at him in rapid succession, each impact barely making him flinch. As Mateo watched, the bullets switched to laser blasts that would have sent anyone else to the hospital.
A gout of flame erupted nearby, the heat washing over the compound like a furnace door opening. Fire—Mateo really needed to start learning everyone's name, stood with his arms outstretched, fire streaming from his palms in controlled bursts that reached toward the sky. His red hair whipped in the thermal updrafts he was creating.
"Focus on your own training," Reeves called out, though her tone held more amusement than annoyance.
Mateo looked up at his tendril, studying the green substance that had always felt more like a burden than a gift. If he wanted to pull himself up without using his arms, he'd need to... retract it? Make it shorter?
He'd never tried absorbing that much slime back into his body, but he concentrated anyway, imagining the substance flowing back through his pores. The tendril began to contract, and suddenly he was rising—not from his arm strength, but from the quirk itself pulling him upward.
"Good," Reeves said, though she sounded about as impressed as someone watching grass grow. "Do that a hundred more times on both arms, then we'll move to the next stage."
She was already walking away, calling out to Alex: "Increase the weight. Ground team, swap out that boulder."
The platform beneath Alex's rock opened like a trapdoor, mechanical arms lowering a new boulder easily twice the size of the first. Alex didn't complain, just reset her stance and began the push-pull sequence again, though Mateo could see the strain in her shoulders now.
He sighed and let his slime extend again, lowering himself before contracting it to rise. The motion felt strange—like learning to use a muscle he'd never known existed.
Around him, the other training sessions painted a picture of their classmates' abilities. Henrik stood merged with what looked like a massive sword, his entire right arm transformed into gleaming steel as he struck target after target. Each hit rang like a bell, the impacts precise and devastating.
Switch—Ken—was working with a partner, one of the girls whose name Mateo hadn't caught yet. She had short brown hair and moved with the fluid grace of a martial artist. In her hands, a baseball bat danced through complex patterns without her actually touching it, the wood spinning and striking targets with telekinetic precision.
Telekinesis, Mateo noted, but lighter than Alex's power. More control, less raw force.
"Alyssa, temperature down to negative ten," Reeves called out to a girl with long black hair who stood in what looked like a climate chamber. The air around her shimmered as frost began forming on every surface within a twenty-foot radius.
Another girl nearby was doing what looked like target practice, concentrated streams of water shooting from her palms, piercing through targets with ease.
Reeves walked to Anon who was watching, no, observing everyone else's powers. Mateo remembered him talking about how his power was more of a utility-based power than a combat skill, which Mateo had first-hand experience to validate that. He had used his quirk and brain to utilize Mateo's slime better than he himself. Mateo could practically see the gears turning in that little head of his, wondering how to make the best use of everyone's powers.
A hundred repetitions in, Mateo's shoulders were burning despite using his quirk instead of his muscles. The constant extension and retraction was exhausting in a way he'd never experienced.
"Mateo." Reeves appeared beside him again, this time carrying what looked like an iron block. "Time for precision training. I want you to use your tendril as a flail."
She set the block down with a heavy thud. "Wrap around it, lift it, swing it at those targets over there. But—" Her pale eyes fixed on his with laser intensity. "—I want accuracy, not just power. Hit each target in sequence, one through ten."
The targets rose from the floors like silent sentinels, spread across a wide area, some high, some low, some requiring him to swing around obstacles. Mateo extended his slime toward the iron block, which he wasn't even sure he could lift properly with his bare arms, wrapping the green substance around it like a tentacle.
The first swing nearly dislocated his shoulder. The block was heavier than it looked, and controlling the trajectory while it spun through the air required a completely different kind of focus. It constantly slipped out of the grip of the tendril, either barely moving or moving a few inches and falling out of the slime tendril.
"Think of it as an extension of your body," Reeves advised, her voice gentler than usual. "Not a tool you're using, but a limb you're moving."
Mateo took a breath in. He recalled when he fought against the drones from yesterday, how he basically drowned the machine in the fluid and threw it against the rubble.
He then imagined doing that to the iron block, concentrating on stabilizing his core and strengthening the tendril's grip. It took him twenty tries to hit the first target.
"Better," Reeves said, and Mateo caught something almost maternal in her tone.
"Hey, Mateo!" Anon jogged over during a break in his measurements, his sheep-wool hair damp with sweat. "I've been thinking about your quirk."
"Yeah?" Mateo replied. He was surprised Anon still had the gall to talk to him like nothing had happened after the backstab from yesterday.
"Have you considered getting specialized equipment? I mean, you can generate slime under pressure, right? What if you had something that could multiply that force?"
Mateo paused mid-swing, the iron block pendulating to a stop. "What do you mean?"
Anon's eyes lit up behind his glasses. "Hydraulic gauntlets. You generate the slime into a pressurized chamber, and the hydraulic system amplifies the force. Instead of just shooting slime, you'd be delivering punches with the force of a hydraulic press."
"I don't know how to build that kind of stuff." Mateo shrugged, brushing off most of what Anon had said, mostly because he didn't even understand half off what came out of his mouth.
"You don't need to know how to build it." Reeves said, nodding with approval at Anon's suggestion. "'I'll have the support gear team design something. Good analysis, Anon."
Anon beamed like the little kid he looked like at the praise.
"I. But first—" She turned back to Mateo. "—finish your precision training. Equipment is useless without control."
Mateo nodded, suddenly thinking about Hero's and Alec's thoughts on them. He vaguely remembered him obsessing over the cool equipment Heros wore to help them fight crime. Did that mean soon Mateo himself would have a cool costume like them?
By the time Reeves called for their first break, Mateo had managed to hit seven out of ten targets in sequence. His shirt was soaked with sweat, his arms felt like overcooked pasta, and he was pretty sure he'd discovered muscles he didn't know existed.
But he was still here. Still pushing forward.
Still becoming something more than he'd been yesterday.