There was a dangerous softness in how power felt when it first arrived—like being handed the warmth of a friend's palm on a winter street. It warmed you, then made you aware of how cold everything else had been. For Max, Feona's voice had become a low current running behind his days, a patient technician who rearranged his reflexes and then stepped back while he learned to use them. The device hummed quietly on his desk when he returned from classes. It blinked as if content that its work had begun.
School was the same ragged machine of bells and small cruelties. Professors assigned chores like destiny; students shifted through the same tired cycles. For a week after the headset, Max had kept his head down—practicing, calibrating, testing micro-movements in the privacy of his bed. He guarded the secret with ritual care: no mention of the console, no showing-off in public, no letting anyone see that his reflex windows had been eased into better form. Secrets had a cost, and he was already aware of it.
On a Wednesday lecture the professor did what professors do best: he found a name to sharpen and pointed at it. "Maximus Dara," he said, the room leaning in like a predator, "you've taken this course half a dozen times by now. Tell us — explain the function of a tristate buffer in synchronous buses. If not, the rest of us will conclude this chorus of failures is personal."
The room cooled into that particular kind of silence a class can hold: like a blade waiting to be tested. Laughter bubbled low in the corner. For reasons Max could not quite explain, the sound of those chuckles stung more now than it had before. The memory of a ruined console, of nights spent trying to patch code, had carved out a very thin well of insecurity that any public nudge could make him fall into.
He rose, palms damp. The lines of the problem were familiar; he had studied boolean gates with the sort of obsessive, lonely devotion that made diagrams slide under his skin. When he opened his mouth, the answer wanted to be careful and direct and perfect. But the room's pressure folded the words into a hard knot.
He stammered, the words leaving like clumsy tools. A trickle of laughter made the room worse. The professor's eyes carried a small, satisfied cruelty. "This is the fourth time you've been asked, Max. I expect better."
Adeola watched from two rows over. She had watched him before with the patient attention of someone who noticed patterns in people like threads in a cloth. Her hand rose as if in reflex. She did not step up to humiliate or save him. She offered a thin kindness instead: a soft, impossible suggestion across the room. "Professor," she said, voice steady, "may I?"
What she did was both ordinary and brave. She walked to the board with the kind of quiet confidence born from working with things until they made sense. Her explanation was clean, as if she had been keeping the problem in the back of her mind for weeks, waiting for the right moment. She broke the logic down into steps that smelled of practice, of the kind of homework that rested like a small, steady rock in one's pocket. The class quieted. The laughter stopped. For a long moment the professor looked like someone surprised by a small miracle.
After class, the awkwardness lingered like a film. Max's cheeks had not cooled. He slid his notes back into his bag, feeling like a man who had the maps but had misplaced his compass. Adeola passed him his paper—he'd dropped it earlier—and gave him a small, almost conspiratorial smile.
"You okay?" she asked. Her tone was without prying. She handed him the paper, and the gesture warmed like a small ember.
He wanted to tell her everything—the way his hands had been steadied by a device that hummed in his skull, the way reflexes had been rewritten like lines of code—but secrecy sat in his mouth like a bitter pill. He swallowed it instead and managed a small grin. "I'll be fine," he said, which was both a lie and a hope.
Feona, listening, noted the exchange like an archivist.
"Social reciprocity calculated: positive. Adeola exhibits ally potential. Recommend maintaining relationship within safe disclosure limits," she advised in the soft, efficient tone Max had come to rely on.
He smiled at the voice in his head. It felt like being given a tutor for personality.
The days moved in small rhythms: Titan's Trial runs in the half-light before dawn, quick repairs at the engineer's shop during the day, class where he kept his head lower than before, and then evenings mapped into micro-training. The overlay on his sight began to feel like a persistent strap—never intrusive, always there to correct a footfall or smooth a breath. Tiny victories stacked: a better block, a quicker parry, fingers that stopped trembling during bursts. Feona's coaching was a steady metronome.
He had begun to enjoy the feeling of being more than he had been. Confidence is itself a substance that changes how light bounces off you. He walked easier. He spoke faster. And with that brightness came a new hunger: if he could do this small thing, what else might be possible?
The answer arrived that Friday, in the form of cheap cruelty.
The corridor behind the engineering workshop had always been a rough place—students who watched one another for signs of weakness, people who liked being loud enough that their insecurity hid behind noise. A group of older students—bully-keen and bored—had taken to picking at anyone with a different rhythm. That day they found Adeola as she left with a stack of notebooks, alone at the wrong moment.
They circled like scavengers.
"Hey, Adeola," one of them grinned, voice thick with the kind of malice that has no reason but boredom. "If you don't practice your circuits, I'll practice something else on you."
One of them made a strangled laugh as he slugged the air as if to threaten. The small crowd closed ranks. Adeola backed up, confusion crossing her face like someone reading a page that suddenly made no sense. Books tumbled and her bag lay splayed with papers fluttering like wounded birds.
Max's first thought was ordinary avoidance—move away, do nothing, mind your own business. He had honed the art of choosing battles; his life before the console had taught him to conserve. But the image of Adeola's slender hands fumbling with her notes snagged on something that felt like a better instinct. He moved forward before he had time to construct a strategy. He pushed through the crowd like a cart with some brake removed.
They noticed him. Laughter swelled at the sight of someone else willing to take risk on an impulse. "Look," one of the bigger boys sneered, "Little Max wants to be a hero. You fixing to play gamer-boy?"
He didn't answer with words. Words in that moment felt like sticks. He answered with the only thing he had trained: motion. Feona whispered angles into his muscles—ways to position weight and use the smallest arc to unbalance an opponent. Each movement was a small arithmetic problem the voice in his head solved in a blink. He ducked a fist, twisted a shoulder to convert attack into loss of balance, and then stepped into a pushing motion that felt like a simple physics proof. One bully stumbled. The others laughed until Adeola screamed and a hand hooked to the back of her neck.
For a few ragged seconds, it was ugly and raw and fraught with the possibility of disaster. These were not encounters designed for honor; they were chaos. Max felt metal and breath and teenage rage in a cramped corridor where shoes scuffed like time. He moved to shield Adeola, an instinct older than Feona's voice and more stubborn.
It wasn't enough. Bully numbers, stupidity, and momentum weighed on his shoulders. One of them caught him in the ribs with a blow that felt like the last line of a contract. His breath left him in a soft, terrified bubble. He tasted iron. The world narrowed. He heard Feona's voice explode into his head with a clarity that ripped away cheap thought.
"Grant takeover?" she asked, as if it were a mechanical choice. "I can take control for twelve seconds with 70 stamina.
There is sufficient reserve. Permission—"
The moment was a cliff with two edges. To say yes was to surrender a small piece of agency to an intelligence lodged in his skull. To say no was to risk seeing Adeola hurt because he had misjudged his own strength. He remembered the earlier line in class where the professor had made him feel small for failing to answer. He remembered the sight of Adeola's hand reaching for his dropped notes as if to tie him to a better version of himself.
"Do it," he heard himself say. The word was small and explosive.
There was a sharp, clinical sensation, then Feona's thoughts bled into every muscle as if she had become the architecture of movement. Her takeover was not like the boots and jumps he had practiced; it was his body sent through an engineer's lens, every tendon a lever that she could nudge. The world became a test bench.
She moved with an economy he could only marvel at. Twelve seconds felt like an eternity when a machine is driving a human body. In that time Feona took down opponents with clean, clinical efficiency—disarming, rerouting, making each strike be the smallest necessary nudge that achieved the largest stopping effect. The hallway's noise shrunk; the blows landed with the certainty of proof. Bully numbers scattered, reforming as distance and uncertainty grew. Adeola stumbled free and stood between the doors, breath shallow and eyes wide.
And then, as if someone had switched the lights, it ended. Feona's grip on his body loosened, and he returned like a diver gasping up through water.
He collapsed against the corridor wall. The world was a spin of raw sensations—pain in his side, the taste of breath, adrenaline bleeding out like red watercolor. For a blessed, small moment, he was not ashamed. He had acted. Adeola was safe.
But there was a cost.
Feona's voice in his head was softer. "Takeover concluded. Residual: auto-healing mode activated due to trauma detection. Health: 370/1000. Auto-heal will allocate stamina-to-health conversion; duration: dependent on incoming treatment. Recommend immediate medical assistance."
Auto-healing was a function buried in the console's architecture—an emergency protocol that siphoned stamina into health regeneration. It was helpful, but it had a price: while active it drained stamina faster and could only be stopped by reaching a minimum health threshold, or by external intervention. It was a safety net, not a free pass.
Adeola had rushed over while he lay there, her hands trembling as she fumbled for a strip of cloth. Her face was pale, but her eyes were sharp with concern that had an odd, human heat to it. She pressed the cloth to his side with a tenderness that made him feel like something fragile and worth hiding.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I should have—" Her voice cracked. "Are you okay? You shouldn't have—"
He tried to shrug off the pain with a small, humorless smile. "It's okay. I'm okay. You're okay."
She wrapped his wound with the sort of care someone does in the absence of med-tech. Her fingers were steady; she had a background in small kindnesses, Max realized—someone who understood how to make a bandage hold and a wound feel smaller by virtue of attention. He could feel the auto-heal doing its quiet arithmetic: stamina siphoned, health climbing in tiny degrees. Feona's overlay showed the numbers in a small corner of his vision—stamina trickling down while health ticked up at a slow, stubborn pace.
"Bandage application detected," Feona said with an odd, neutral pride. "Bandage efficacy: +3 health/stamina conversion rate. Continued application will improve recovery speed."
Adeola's presence made the entire scene gentler. She seemed both embarrassed and furious with herself for not having been able to prevent the fight. Her voice was a small, fierce cord. "You're reckless," she scolded softly. "You should not have done that alone."
"You weren't alone," he said, trying to be light when his chest felt hollow and blunt. "You were there."
She sighed and sat cross-legged beside him on the floor, papers and books scattered like small islands. For a strange, human moment, the noise of the corridor receded and it felt like two strange survivors sharing a blanket. They spoke in small exchanges—nothing about consoles, nothing about Feona—just commonalities.
"Oh," she said finally, glance flicking sideways, curiosity softened with careful boundaries. "If you ever need help with class, I can show you a different way to think about these gates. You're… almost there. You just need to stop letting the room decide your answer."
He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to confess the voice in his head and the screw in his neck and the way Feona had reshaped his reflexes like a hand smoothing clay. Instead he said, "Thanks," because it was honest and because, for now, certain things must remain sealed like precious seeds.
They parted with a promise of quiet and mutual study. Adeola left with a small, steady look that made his chest ache the way the first lines of a map do when you know there's an undiscovered place somewhere along the margin.
Feona's voice lingered like a cool hand. "You have performed well," she said, "but note: stamina will recover slowly while auto-heal runs. Avoid exertion beyond 30% capacity for twenty-four hours. Recommend controlled rest and bandage monitoring."
Max lay back on his narrow bed and let the ceiling blur. His side throbbed in small painful cadences, and the world felt both narrowed and renewed. He had demonstrated what he could do, and it had mattered. For the first time since the console had nested at the base of his skull, the machine had answered a call not for games or glory but for a simple human need: to keep someone else from being hurt.
It was not a cheap triumph. It was not a clean victory. But as the auto-heal did its stoic work and the bandage lay warm at his side, he thought of Adeola's steady fingers and the uncompromising smallness of being human. Feona's voice, always the reliable metronome, ended the day with a small, serviceable command.
"Rest," she said, "and note: your growth is not linear. Practice will stack. Tomorrow, conserve. The long work begins."
Max closed his eyes with those words like a vow. The long work had begun, and for the first time the road felt less like something he had to hide from and more like a place he had to get ready for.