The final day before the exam. The air itself felt different, thin and sharp with tension.
Kael stood alone in a forgotten corner of the public training grounds, a graveyard for obsolete equipment. The main areas were a chaotic symphony of power, a cacophony of roaring explosions, crackling energy, and shouted kiai from a hundred hopefuls making their final preparations.
Here, it was quiet. Just him, a graffiti-scarred concrete wall, and a set of dented metal targets that looked like they'd lost a fight with a cannon. The smell of ozone and burnt sugar from a nearby speed-trainer's Evolve hung in the air.
He took a breath, the gritty dust coating his tongue.
"With my head, not just my hands."
His own words from yesterday were a lifeline. He wasn't here to match the brute force he saw across the field. He was here to find his own path. It wasn't about raw power. It was about control. About creativity.
He extended a hand, palm open. A soft, familiar light bloomed, barely bright enough to cast a shadow in the afternoon sun. It was weak. Pathetic, even, compared to the miniature suns and lightning spears being thrown around a hundred yards away.
But it was his.
"Don't just make it shine. Make it do something. Think about the feeling, not the result."
He focused, sweat beading on his forehead. He imagined the light condensing, becoming a solid projectile. A marble of light, like he'd practiced. He tried to recall the desperate feeling from the alley, the instinctive need to protect.
His knuckles were white with strain. The veins on his arm stood out.
flicker
The light wavered, unstable as a candle flame in a hurricane. It pulsed weakly and then died, leaving a faint afterimage burned into his vision. He grunted in frustration, shaking his hand as if to get rid of the failure.
From the edge of the training zone, a pair of senior students watched, their expensive training suits gleaming. They were laughing.
"Is that guy trying to power a lightbulb with his Evolve?" one of them sneered, loud enough to carry. "He's a certified Null-Tier."
"Leave him be," the other said, though his voice was thick with amusement. "It's kind of sad. Let him have his last moment before reality hits tomorrow. He won't even make it past the written exam."
Their words were barbs, but today they didn't sting the way they used to. Kael barely registered them, filtering them out as meaningless static. He was too focused on the puzzle inside him.
He tried again. This time, he didn't try to force it. He pictured the light not as a weapon, but as an extension of his will. He remembered how it felt to blind the thug in the alley. It wasn't about force; it was about precision. About a single, perfect purpose.
He aimed at a target ten feet away, a red circle painted on dented metal.
hmmmmmm…
The light in his palm swirled, a tiny vortex of pale energy. He could feel the drain, the familiar ache behind his eyes.
He pushed.
A small mote of light drifted from his hand, slow and wobbling like a soap bubble. It traveled five feet before dissipating into nothing more than a few stray sparks.
pffft.
Failure. Again.
But it was a different kind of failure. It was progress. He hadn't done that before. He'd made it move.
He wiped the sweat from his brow, ignoring the burning ache in his arm and the metallic taste of exhaustion in his mouth. He ignored the setting sun, which cast long, judgmental shadows across the training ground.
He took another deep breath. Refusing to quit. Determined to take this one small step.
Again.
—--
Hours bled into one another, each one a testament to his stubbornness.
The sky bruised from a brilliant orange to a deep, starless purple. The cacophony of the training grounds had faded to a respectful silence as, one by one, the other applicants had left. They were confident in their abilities, or too exhausted to continue.
Kael remained. A solitary figure under the harsh glare of the security lamps.
His body screamed with fatigue. His energy was a shallow pool, nearly empty, the bottom littered with the sediment of a hundred failures. But his will was a sharpened edge, honed by every single one. He had entered a strange, trance-like state where the world outside his bubble of concentration ceased to exist.
He stood before the concrete wall, his breathing ragged and shallow.
"One more time. Just one more. Don't think. Just feel."
He raised his hand, channeling the last dregs of his stamina. The movement was slow, heavy, as if he were moving his arm through water. He didn't even aim for a target. He just wanted to feel the light respond, to have one success to carry him into the trials of the next day.
He focused on that warmth in his soul, the faint spark of his Evolve. He didn't push it. He didn't command it. He… asked. He surrendered to it.
hmmmmmm…
The light appeared in his palm. It was brighter this time, a clean, pure white that seemed to drink the artificial light around it. It pulsed with a steady, rhythmic beat, a silent drum that matched his own heart.
He felt a strange, profound connection to it, a harmony he'd never experienced before. It felt like a part of him he was only just meeting for the first time.
He pushed it forward, expecting another weak, floating mote to mock his efforts.
But this time was different. The world seemed to slow, the air growing thick and still.
The light shot from his palm. It didn't form a ball or a beam. It compressed instantly into a thin, sharp line. A perfect, unwavering needle of pure, white light.
VMMMM–
It didn't float. It flew. Straight and true, faster than his eye could track. There was no sound, yet the world seemed to vibrate with a silent, resonant frequency.
It struck the concrete wall.
There was no explosion. No shattering impact. For a split second, there was only that low, resonant hum that vibrated deep in Kael's bones, in his very teeth.
And then, the impossible happened.
Where the needle of light touched the wall, a perfect, circular hole appeared. It was no bigger than his fist. It didn't look like it was blasted or melted away. There was no dust, no debris.
It looked like the concrete in that spot had simply been… erased from existence.
CRACKLE!
The light vanished. The hum stopped instantly. The silence that rushed back in was deafening. A delicate spiderweb of fractures spread out from the edges of the surgically precise hole.
Kael stared, his jaw slack, his eyes wide. His entire body was trembling, but not from exhaustion.
It was from a profound, terrifying shock.
He took a stumbling step forward, his legs weak and uncooperative. He thought for a moment he might be hallucinating, a final trick of his exhausted mind. He reached out a shaking hand and touched the edge of the hole. It was smooth. Unnaturally cold.
"What…?"
His mind raced, trying to process what he'd just seen. What he'd just done.
That wasn't a flash. That wasn't a glow.
That was… something else entirely. Something his power should not have been able to do.
He looked at his palm, at the hand that had just effortlessly pierced solid concrete. It looked the same as it always had.
Weak. Unimpressive.
He clenched it into a fist, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"…was that?"
—--
FROM A HIGH VANTAGE POINT, a lone figure watched, their form a sharp silhouette against the city's neon glow.
They stood on the rooftop of the adjacent administrative building, cloaked in the deep shadows of the evening. They had been observing the training grounds for hours, a ritual they performed before every entrance exam, their gaze sweeping over the dozens of flashy, powerful applicants.
A bored expression was fixed on their face, etched by years of seeing the same thing. They'd seen it all before. Explosions that shook the ground. Elemental manipulation that bent fire and ice to a teenager's will. Displays of brute force that could level a building.
It was all so… predictable. So loud. So lacking in finesse.
They were about to turn away, to leave this uninspired cohort to their pre-exam rituals and retire for the night.
Then their eyes, trained to spot the unusual, caught a small flicker of movement in a deserted corner of the grounds. A boy. Scrawny. Dressed in worn street clothes, a stark contrast to the tactical gear everyone else wore.
The figure sighed internally, a puff of condescension. Another one. The desperate, the weak, the delusional, chasing an impossible dream.
They watched for a moment out of morbid curiosity as the boy struggled, his light-based Evolve so weak it was barely visible from this distance. They saw him fail, again and again. Saw his frustration, but also his stubborn, almost stupid refusal to yield.
It was a common sight. But there was something in the boy's posture, a focused intensity that was different from the usual flailing of the powerless.
The observer turned to leave, their assessment complete. Another failure in the making.
VMMMM–
A low hum, almost too faint to hear, reached them. It was a strange sound, clean and pure, a single perfect note in an orchestra of chaotic noise. It cut through the ambient city sounds and straight into their experienced ears.
Their head snapped back towards the boy, their movement sharp and sudden.
They saw it. A razor-thin line of light, impossibly fast. The clean, perfect hole in the concrete. The subsequent crackle of dissipating energy.
The observer froze, their nonchalant posture gone.
Their bored expression vanished, replaced by one of sharp, analytical focus. They felt a jolt of adrenaline, a feeling they hadn't experienced in years.
CLOSE UP on their eyes, which narrowed in intense concentration. They leaned forward slightly, their entire posture shifting from one of casual disinterest to that of a predator that had just spotted rare, unbelievable prey.
They watched as the boy stared at his hand, at the wall, a picture of pure bewilderment. He clearly had no idea what he had just done. It wasn't a technique. It was an accident. An instinct.
It wasn't a fluke of power. It wasn't an overload; the energy signature was too clean, too controlled, too small. They ran a mental checklist. "Kinetic impact? No shockwave. Thermal penetration? No scorch marks, no melting. Transmutation? The material is gone, not changed."
This was something else. Something… fundamental. Something many believed to be a myth.
The observer remained silent, a statue in the encroaching darkness. They did not move. They did not reveal themselves.
A small, thin smile touched the edge of their lips. It was the smile of a historian discovering a lost city.
They reached into their coat, pulling out a small, worn notebook and a pen.
With a flick of their wrist, they found the boy's applicant number and made a single, quick notation beside it.
"Deletion-type? Investigate."
"Well now," a quiet voice murmured to the empty air, the sound laced with a sudden, fierce excitement.
"This just got interesting."
—--
Kael stumbled back from the wall, his mind a whirlwind of confusion and awe. He sank to his knees on the cracked pavement, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps that did nothing to calm the frantic beating of his heart.
He held his hands up in front of his face, turning them over and over under the dim security lights of the training ground. They looked alien to him now.
They were just hands. Calloused from chores, scraped from training. There was nothing special about them.
But they had just done something impossible. They had just told the universe to make a piece of itself disappear, and the universe had listened.
"How?"
The question was a desperate whisper, addressed to the empty air, to the hole in the wall, to himself.
He had spent his entire life being told his power was useless. A passive, cosmetic Evolve. A cosmic joke. Good for finding lost keys under a sofa and nothing more. The label of 'Null-Tier' had been his shadow since he was a child.
He had believed it. A part of him, the logical, beaten-down part, still did. It was easier to believe in his own weakness than to confront the evidence in front of him.
But the hole in the wall was real. He could see it. He had touched its impossibly smooth, cold edges. It was a cold, hard fact that defied everything he knew about himself, about the world, about the nature of Evolves.
Was this what he'd been chasing all this time? Was this the potential buried beneath mountains of weakness and self-doubt? A power not of light, but of… absence?
He tried to summon the light again, a desperate need to prove it wasn't a hallucination.
He closed his eyes, focusing on the memory of the feeling. That pure, resonant hum. That perfect, terrifying harmony between his will and his power. He searched for it within himself, a blind man groping in the dark for a switch.
flicker…
A pathetic, weak glow appeared in his palm for a second, then sputtered out like a dying ember.
Nothing. He was empty. The fatigue he had been holding at bay crashed down on him, a heavy, suffocating blanket smothering the last of his energy.
He slumped forward, resting his forehead on the cool ground, the rough texture a grounding sensation.
He wasn't disappointed. He was electrified. He was terrified.
The flicker was gone, but the knowledge of it remained. It was a seed of possibility planted in the barren soil of his doubt. A dangerous, beautiful, terrifying seed.
"It's in there," he thought, a frantic, wild hope blooming in his chest. It was a hope so fierce it felt like pain. "I don't know what it is. I don't know how to control it. But it's real."
This changed everything.
The exam was no longer just about survival. Ren was no longer just a rival to be endured.
They were obstacles on a new path. A path to understanding the stranger living inside him. His goal wasn't just to be a hero anymore. It was to solve the mystery of himself.
He pushed himself up, his movements slow and aching. Every muscle in his body protested, screaming with the effort.
He looked at the hole in the wall one last time, committing its perfect, impossible shape to memory. It was his secret. His proof.
A real, genuine smile touched his lips for the first time in what felt like years. It was tired, shaky, and utterly triumphant.
The determination he felt before was a flickering candle against a storm.
This was a forge, and something new had just been cast in the fire.
—--
End of Chapter 5