Reo's mother threw the empty Windhoek Lager bottle at his head.
He ducked, the glass shattering against the kitchen wall behind him, and for the thousandth time this year he ran the same mental calculation: six more months until he turned eighteen, approximately one hundred and eighty days, which broke down to four thousand three hundred and twenty hours of keeping his head down and his mouth shut.
"You drank it, didn't you?" His mother swayed in the doorway, her words slurring at the edges. "You little shit, you drank my last beer."
"I didn't touch it," he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the floor. Standard procedure. Don't engage, don't escalate, don't give her ammunition. "I don't drink."
"Liar."
The word hit harder than the bottle would have. Reo's hands clenched at his sides, nails digging into his palms. His father was passed out on the couch like always, useless as always, and his mother was three drinks past reason, which meant this conversation had exactly one ending and he already knew how it played out.
"I'm not lying," he hated how his voice cracked on the last word.
"You're always lying. Just like your father. Useless, both of you." She stumbled forward, and Reo took a reflexive step back. "Twenty years I've wasted on this family. Twenty years, and what do I have to show for it? A drunk husband and a powerless son."
There it was.
The real issue, the one that always circled back no matter what excuse started the fight. Reo was seventeen years old, and according to every medical scanner in Windhoek, he had exactly zero Hunter potential.
No awakening at birth like normal people, no sudden manifestation during puberty like the late bloomers, nothing. The government had tested him six times. Six different facilities, six different machines, six different doctors all reaching the same conclusion: Reo was completely, utterly, permanently mundane.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, because that's what you said to make it stop.
"Sorry doesn't pay the bills nor does it fix the fact that I gave birth to a dud." she laughed, sharp and bitter. "Do you know what the neighbors say? They ask me when your awakening ceremony is. They want to know what Guild you'll join. And I have to smile and lie and tell them you're a late bloomer because I can't admit the truth."
The truth, Reo had lived with the truth for seventeen years. He'd watched his classmates manifest fire, ice and telekinesis, watched them get scouted by Guilds and corporations, watched them become something while he stayed nothing.
The powerless didn't get scholarships, or get any opportunities. They got service jobs and studio apartments in Katutura and a lifetime of knowing they were the evolutionary dead end in a world that had moved past them.
"It's not my fault," he said, and immediately regretted it.
His mother's eyes narrowed. "What did you say?"
"Nothing. I didn't—"
"No, no, you said something. You think this isn't your fault?" She moved closer, and Reo could smell the alcohol on her breath, could see the broken capillaries in her eyes. "You think I wanted this? You think I wanted to be stuck in this shithole apartment with a useless husband and a defective son?"
Defective.
The word wrapped around Reo's throat like a noose, and suddenly he couldn't breathe. The kitchen walls pressed in, the light overhead suddenly felt too loud, his mother's voice became distorted and distant, and he felt like he was drowning, drowning, drowning in a room with no water.
"I didn't ask to be born!" The words tore out of him before he could stop them. "I didn't ask for any of this!"
"Don't you raise your voice at me—"
"I'm seventeen years old and I've spent every single day of my life being told I'm worthless!" He was shouting now, something clawing its way up his chest. "You think I don't know I'm powerless? You think I don't feel it every time someone looks at me? I know, Mom! I know I'm a disappointment! I know I'm not what you wanted! But I'm trying, I'm trying so fucking hard, and nothing I do is ever enough!"
His mother raised her hand, and Reo saw the slap coming but couldn't make himself move, couldn't make himself care, and then—
The world fractured.
It wasn't painful. It was the opposite of painful, like every nerve in his body suddenly remembered how to work properly after seventeen years of static. Heat flooded his chest, spreading down his arms and legs, and for one brilliant second he felt seen, like the universe had finally looked at him and decided he was worth noticing.
His mother's hand stopped mid-swing. She stared at him, eyes wide, and took a stumbling step backward.
"Your eyes," she whispered.
He blinked, and the kitchen snapped back into focus. The drowning sensation disappeared. He felt exactly the same as he had thirty seconds ago, except his mother was looking at him like he'd grown a second head.
"What about my eyes?"
"They were glowing." His mother pressed herself against the counter, suddenly sober in that way drunks got when something genuinely scared them. "Blue light. I saw it."
'No way,' Reo thought. 'No fucking way. Could it be?'
He ran to the bathroom, nearly tripping over his father's legs, and flipped on the light. His reflection stared back at him, same as always: messy black hair, dark circles under his eyes, the kind of skinny that came from skipping meals to avoid his parents, nothing special, nothing remarkable, and definitely no glowing.
But something felt different. There was a pressure behind his sternum, like a balloon slowly inflating, and when he focused on it, really concentrated, he felt... potential. That was the only word for it. Like he was standing at the edge of something vast and unknown, and all he had to do was reach out and—
His phone buzzed. A notification lit up the screen: AWAKENING DETECTED. REPORT TO NEAREST GUILD HALL FOR EVALUATION WITHIN 24 HOURS. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN FINES.
He stared at the message for a full ten seconds before his brain caught up with reality.
He'd awakened.
At seventeen years old, two months before his eighteenth birthday, after a lifetime of being told it would never happen, Reo had finally awakened a power.
'Holy shit. What the hell can I do?'
---
The next day, Reo made his was to the nearest guild hall. He sat in a plastic chair in the waiting area, surrounded by nervous twelve-year-olds and their parents, all of them here for their official evaluations.
Standard procedure: you awakened, the government implant detected it, you came to the Guild Hall to get tested and categorized and filed away in whatever database tracked these things.
The building was one of those converted colonial-era structures in the city center, all high ceilings and whitewashed walls that the government had retrofitted with scanning equipment and reinforced doors after the event that changed everything forty years ago. Reo had walked past it a hundred times but never actually been inside.
He'd been waiting for three hours.
He spent the time trying to figure out what his power actually was. So far, he determined it had something to do with his hands, because every time he focused on that pressure in his chest, his palms tingled. Beyond that? No clue.
He hadn't accidentally set anything on fire or moved objects with his mind or suddenly understood the secrets of the universe. He just felt... full, like his body was a container holding something it hadn't been designed to hold.
"Reo Lugameni?" A bored-looking woman in a Guild uniform stood in the doorway, holding a tablet. She had the kind of face that said she processed ten thousand of these evaluations and yours wasn't special. "Room seven."
He followed her down a hallway lined with motivational posters (YOUR POWER IS YOUR FUTURE! STRONG HUNTERS, STRONG NATION! NAMIBIA RANKS 3RD IN AFRICAN GUILD CONTRIBUTIONS!) and into an evaluation room. The woman gestured at a chair facing a complex array of scanning equipment.
"Sit. This'll take twenty minutes."
Reo sat.
The woman tapped her tablet, and the machines came to life, projecting blue light across his body. He felt the pressure in his chest respond, pulsing in rhythm with the scanners, and resisted the urge to fidget.
Twenty minutes turned into thirty. The woman's bored expression slowly shifted to confusion, then interest.
"Huh," she said finally.
"Huh?" Reo repeated. "What does 'huh' mean?"
"It means your power is weird." She turned the tablet toward him, showing a display filled with numbers and graphs that meant absolutely nothing to Reo. "You're registering as an E-rank, which is standard for new awakenings, but the classification is... I've never seen this before."
"What is it?"
The woman squinted at her screen. "Some kind of creation ability? Maybe? The system's flagging it as 'Replication' but that usually means—hold on." She swiped through several pages, frowning. "Okay, yeah, Replication-type. Extremely rare. You can make copies of things."
Reo blinked. "Copies."
"Objects, mostly. Some Replicators can do organic material but that's high-rank stuff. You'll probably start with basic items. Touch something, focus your energy, make a duplicate." She looked up from her tablet. "It's not a combat power, obviously. Most Replicators end up in manufacturing or support roles. Good news is there's decent money in it once you rank up."
"I can copy things," he said slowly, testing the words.
"Yep. Congratulations, you're a glorified 3D printer." The woman's phone buzzed, and she glanced at it with barely concealed relief. "Okay, evaluation's done. Your Guild registration will process in three to five business days. In the meantime, practice your ability but don't replicate currency or regulated items. That's a felony. Any questions?"
Reo had about a thousand questions, but the woman was already standing up, clearly ready to move on to the next case.
"No," he said. "Thanks."
She left without another word. Reo sat alone in the evaluation room, staring at his hands, and felt something that might have been disappointment or might have been relief.
He couldn't shoot fire from his palms. He couldn't fly or turn invisible or punch through walls. He could... make copies of things.
'A glorified 3D printer,' he thought, and almost laughed.
Then he thought about his mother's words last night. 'Sorry doesn't pay the bills.'
And suddenly, Reo wasn't disappointed at all.
---
The first thing Reo replicated was his phone.
He'd gone home after the evaluation, locked himself in his room, and spent two hours trying to make his power work. The Guild woman had said touch something and focus, which sounded simple but turned out to be anything but.
The first dozen attempts produced nothing except a headache and sweaty palms. But on the thirteenth try, when he was ready to give up and accept that maybe his power was broken like everything else in his life, something clicked.
The pressure in his chest surged down his arm and into his hand, and suddenly he felt his phone. Not just the physical weight of it, but the architecture underneath: circuits and glass and battery and code, all of it mapped out in his mind like a blueprint he could read without trying.
The sensation lasted maybe three seconds, then the pressure peaked and—
A perfect duplicate of his phone materialized on the desk.
He stared at it. Then at his original phone. Then back at the duplicate.
"No fucking way," he whispered.
He picked up the duplicate. It was identical down to the scratches on the case, the crack in the screen protector, even the 47% battery indicator. He turned it on, and it worked perfectly, same apps, same login, same everything.
'Holy shit. This is actually insane.'
He spent the next hour replicating everything in his room: pens, notebooks, a bag of Simba chips, his laptop charger. Each replication took between fifteen and forty-five seconds depending on the complexity, and after the fifth one Reo felt exhausted, like he'd just run a marathon. Apparently his power had a stamina cost. Good to know.
But the implications...
He looked at the duplicate phone in his hand, then at the laptop charger he copied, then at the half-empty wallet on his desk.
He had the same dream since he was twelve years old: open a computer store. Not a big chain, just a small shop where people could buy GPUs and CPUs and gaming peripherals without getting ripped off.
He spent countless hours watching YouTube videos about PC building, reading tech forums, planning inventory lists, imagining what his store would look like. Maybe somewhere near Grove Mall or along Independence Avenue where foot traffic was decent.
It had always been a fantasy. He was powerless, he had no money, his parents would never support him, and even if he somehow scraped together enough cash for a down payment, who would take a chance on a seventeen-year-old with no credentials and zero Hunter status?
But now...
He pulled a N$200 note from his wallet. He held it in his palm, felt that pressure build in his chest, and focused.
The world held its breath.
Then a perfect duplicate of the bill appeared next to the original, and Reo's life changed forever.