“So,” he said, changing the subject with the grace of a falling anvil. “Have you figured out who I am yet?”

  I shook my head. “Total mystery. Should I be worried?”

  He smiled slightly, a real, genuine smile this time. “Well, two years ago, I was Jupiter for the Olympians. There was some… internal conflict, and instead of dragging the whole team through the mud with a public feud, I moved here to the Academy. Quieter life.”

  I shrugged. “That sounds cool. What class are you?” Anyone on the Olympians had to be at least a high Four, maybe a Five.

  He smirked. “Class Eight.”

  The air left my lungs. Class Eight. There were only a handful of Class Eights in recorded history. The kind of Alphas who could fight kaiju one-on-one. The kind who had their own contingency plans filed with the BSA.

  He saw the shock on my face. “Wanna guess who I was before I became Jupiter? I will give you a hint. You and I have something in common.”

  I looked at him, my mind racing through the history books, the news archives, the list of names that were more legend than fact. There had only been one male Class Eight in history. Only one. My mouth went dry.

  “uhh… You kept your class hidden?” I stammered, unable to form the name.

  He shook his head. “Nope. I was Graviton.”

  The name landed in the silent dojo with the force of a physical blow. Graviton. The name wasn't just from a history book; it was from a physics textbook. The man who didn't just manipulate gravity; he was gravity. He was the reason the Kaiju codenamed 'Behemoth' was now a collection of rapidly cooling asteroids scattered between Mars and Jupiter. He was the reason the city of San Andreas still existed after the fault line tried to unmake it. He was a strategic asset, a force of nature with a government pension.

  And he was sitting across from me, asking about my pathetic energy budget.

  “Oh,” I said, my voice a small, pathetic squeak. It was the most intelligent thing I could manage.

  “The thing we have in common,” he continued, as if he hadn’t just dropped a tectonic plate on my worldview, “is that our powers don’t play nice with the Ether. They’re… different. Off the books. Mine pulls from something else. Yours… yours is a complete goddamn mystery, and that is the most fascinating thing I’ve encountered in a decade.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He leaned forward, his massive frame seeming to block out the light. “You think you’re a cheap knock-off. A stage magician. But you’re looking at your power through the wrong lens. You’re not a Tinker. You’re not an Elemental. You’re a Reality Editor. You just don’t have the administrative privileges to save your changes yet.”

  He pointed a finger like a sausage at the clipboard. “That number, 264. That’s not your energy. That’s your buffer. Your RAM. It’s the computational power you can dedicate to running your ‘edits’ before you get a stack overflow and your whole system crashes, leaving you a hungry, exhausted mess.”

  The analogy was almost... too perfect. That made me instantly distrust it, as usual. Perfect solutions were almost always loaded with hidden traps, usually because they only worked in a perfect vacuum.

  “The energy you manipulate,” he went on, “the heat, the kinetic force… you’re not generating it or destroying it. You’re reallocating it. You’re taking the universe’s energy and moving it somewhere else in the equation. Where? I don’t know. Into potential states? Into latent dimensional membranes? Into the past or the future? Hell if I know. That’s your homework. But that foil-in-the-jet-engine trick? The energy has to go somewhere. The law demands it.”

  He stood up, and I scrambled to my feet as well, feeling like a courtier in the presence of a king. “Your first lesson starts now. And it’s not about making bigger fireballs or harder armor. It’s about finding the leak.”

  “The… leak?” I asked, my brain still struggling to catch up.

  “You’re hemorrhaging efficiency,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Every time you stop a bullet, you’re spending a hundred times the energy you need to. You’re brute-forcing it. You’re trying to code a complex simulation in binary. You need to learn the language. You need to find where all that energy you’re moving is actually going, and you need to start siphoning a little off the top for your own damn buffer.”

  He cracked his knuckles, a sound like snapping tree trunks. “So. Let’s start with something simple. I’m going to throw a pebble at you. Your job is to stop it. Not with a shield, not by hardening the air. Stop the pebble itself. Feel the kinetic energy in it. And then… redirect it. Don’t absorb it. Send it somewhere else.”

  He reached into a pocket of his gi and pulled out a single, ordinary-looking river stone. “Ready?”

  I wasn’t. Not even a little. My heart was hammering against my ribs. This was Graviton. He probably threw pebbles that could core tanks.

  He saw the panic on my face and smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s just a pebble. Probably.”

  He drew his arm back. There was no flash of light, no gathering of power. It was just a big man about to throw a small rock.

  But as he did, he spoke one last time, his words etching themselves into my mind.

  “And kid? Welcome to Advanced Applied Metaphysics. Try not to unravel the space-time continuum on your first day.”