Ryan didn't go straight to the arena.
He went back to his bench, sat down, and gave himself ninety seconds to understand the thing on his wrist before it had to save his life.
The Omnitrix. The name sat in his mind like a stone at the bottom of a clear pool — visible, solid, impossible. In his first life, it had been fiction. A cartoon prop on a ten-year-old's wrist, wielded by a kid who fought aliens in the desert and was home in time for dinner. Entertaining. Ridiculous. Not real.
But the weight on his arm was real. The pulse of green light cycling through the faceplate was real. And the information now flooding into his consciousness — bypassing his ears, his eyes, every normal sensory channel — was real in a way that made his teeth ache.
「Omnitrix System Interface initialized. Displaying core functions.」
「Function 1 — Transformation: Host may assume unlocked alien hero forms. Current duration: 10 minutes per activation. Cooldown: 60 minutes between transformations.」
「Function 2 — Gene Collection: Omnitrix can absorb and catalog compatible alien DNA. New hero forms are unlocked through sufficient energy input. Compatible sources include original database specimens and unique organisms native to this dimension.」
「Function 3 — Fusion Mode: Two or more unlocked forms may be merged into hybrid configurations. Warning: fusion reduces available transformation time proportionally.」
「Function 4 — Human Form Enhancement: Each newly unlocked alien form permanently upgrades host physiology. Passive physical enhancements and attenuated ability access persist in base form without transformation.」
Ryan read each line twice. The first three functions tracked roughly with what he remembered from the show — transformation, DNA collection, fusion. The mechanics were tighter, the rules more rigid, but the core logic was the same.
Function Four was different.
Function Four wasn't from any episode he'd ever watched. It wasn't from any version of the Omnitrix he'd ever heard of. Permanent passive upgrades. Alien abilities without transforming. That meant every new form he unlocked wouldn't just give him another ten-minute weapon — it would fundamentally, irreversibly improve what he was at baseline.
This isn't a gadget. It's an evolution engine.
He flexed his fingers. The watch sat snug against his wrist, warm to the touch, humming with a frequency he could feel in his bones. Currently, it held a single form: Heatblast. Fire manipulation. Pyrokinesis. One of the most straightforward aliens in the original roster, and one of the most devastating.
Ten minutes of fire.
Against an opponent he'd never fought, with abilities he'd never used, in a body he'd inhabited for less than twenty minutes.
The math wasn't great.
Before today — before Ryan's real mind had surfaced — this body's Ryan Blake had been classified as a Passive Awakener whose ability was, according to the official evaluation, "the manifestation of a non-functional timepiece." A broken watch. Zero combat potential. The evaluators had looked at the Omnitrix, failed to understand it, stamped the file, and moved on.
That classification was the reason Derek Hartwell's father felt comfortable rigging a public match. Why would anyone worry about crushing a boy whose registered ability was a piece of jewelry?
Less than four minutes.
Ryan closed his eyes and breathed.
His first life had been... nothing. That was the honest word for it. He'd lived thirty-one years without making a single mark on anything. Average job, average apartment, average death — probably, though he couldn't remember the specifics, and that bothered him less than it should have. He'd been a spectator in his own existence, watching it scroll past like someone else's feed, and then it was over.
And now he was here.
Eighteen years old. Sitting on a metal bench in a stadium full of people who expected him to be destroyed. Armed with an alien weapon no one understood, least of all him. And somewhere on the other side of that field, a boy with wind-wings and a famous last name was warming up to break his face.
Something shifted in Ryan's chest. Not courage — he wasn't brave enough for courage, not yet. Something colder. Something that had been forming since the moment he'd felt those memories of sleeping on the balcony, of going to school hungry, of Amber Lawson's hand connecting with his cheek for the hundredth time.
Refusal.
Not defiance. Not rage. Just a simple, absolute refusal to let this life go the way the last one had.
I won't waste this.
"A patient man," he murmured, "waits ten years for revenge." A pause. "I was never that patient."
「Ding! Significant shift in host's psychological state detected. Recalibrating...」
「Heatblast synchronization enhanced. Physical optimization initiated.」
It hit like a current.
Every cell in his body ignited — not with pain, but with intensity. Like plunging into water that was exactly the right temperature on both sides of too hot. His muscles clenched, released, and reformed. He could feel the architecture of his body changing — fat burning away, fibers tightening, everything pulling taut and hard like a rope under tension. The soft layer around his midsection dissolved. What replaced it felt like armor.
He looked down at his hands. They were the same hands, but they weren't. The tendons stood out sharper. The grip felt different. Stronger.
And he felt nothing wrong. No discomfort. No side effects. Just a settled, bone-deep sense of power that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.
So that's what it feels like to be enhanced by something that isn't human.
The knowledge should have frightened him. It didn't.
"Derek Hartwell of Awakening Class One versus Ryan Blake of Normal Class One! Both combatants, report to the arena immediately! Failure to appear will be counted as a forfeit!"
Ryan stood. The students around him flinched — a subtle, reflexive pulling-back that they probably didn't even notice. But a few of them paused, squinting, tilting their heads.
"Does he look... different to you?"
"Yeah. Something's off. Like he's not the same person."
On the far side of the field, the Awakening Class section was buzzing. Derek Hartwell was on his feet, surrounded by a knot of admirers whose primary function was to agree with everything he said.
"Bold of him." Derek's arms were crossed. His expression was the kind of calm that concealed contempt the way a lake conceals its depth. "Coming to the arena without a weapon. Without anything. He's either suicidal or stupid."
"Nobody compares to you, Derek. You're on another level."
"Obviously. Make sure someone records this. I want the footage playing on the school displays for a week."
Every phone in the stadium was already out. Livestreamers had set up tripods with titles that told the whole story: "Active vs. Passive — How Fast Is the KO?" and "Watch This Nobody Get Destroyed."
You couldn't blame them for the predictions. Since the awakening system had been formalized generations ago, not a single ability classified as "non-functional" had ever amounted to anything in combat. The statistical probability of Ryan Blake lasting more than thirty seconds against an Active Awakener was, by every available metric, essentially zero.
The gap between them was the gap between a bonfire and a matchstick.
Amber Lawson sat in the bleachers, the swelling on her cheek partially hidden by her hair, smugness written across every visible inch of her face.
Now we'll see. Now everyone will see what happens to trash that doesn't know its place.
A figure in a cyan training suit leaped onto the arena platform — effortless, graceful, landing in a slight crouch that drew an automatic round of applause. Derek Hartwell. Lean, sharp-featured, radiating the easy confidence of someone who had never once in his life doubted that he deserved to win.
Ryan walked up the steps on the opposite side.
No leap. No flourish. Just one foot in front of the other, hands loose at his sides, his face carrying an expression that nobody in the stadium could quite read. It wasn't fear. It wasn't bravado. It was something quieter — the look of a man who had made a decision and was no longer interested in discussing it.
"Amber told me you refused to surrender." Derek's voice carried across the platform, pitched for the crowd. "I figured you were bluffing. Putting on a show for your girlfriend." He smiled. "But here you are. So either you're braver than I thought, or dumber."
Ryan looked at him for a long moment.
"You know what's interesting?" he said. "When a sick person refuses to take their medicine, but then turns around and asks the healthy person if they're the one with a problem." He paused. "Don't you think that person is the crazy one?"
"Yeah," Derek said automatically.
Laughter erupted from the crowd — sudden, sharp, and widespread. Derek's smile curdled as the realization hit him a full second too late. He'd just agreed to being called crazy on a live broadcast.
The laughter died the instant his expression changed.
"You're dead."
Wings materialized behind him. They were translucent and cyan, humming with a frequency that made the air vibrate, each feather-shaped blade of compressed wind energy shimmering like heat haze. Derek rose off the platform — two feet, three feet — and hovered there, looking down at Ryan the way a hawk looks at a field mouse.
"We signed the waiver," Derek said, and his voice had lost every trace of showmanship. What remained was cold. "Whatever happens to you is on you."
Ryan didn't flinch. Didn't step back. Didn't look up.
"Idiot."
One word. Barely a whisper. But Derek heard it.
The wings flared wide.
"I am going to make you wish you were never born."
"MATCH — START!"
Derek moved.
The speed was wrong. Not fast the way a sprinter is fast — fast the way a bullet is fast, crossing distance in a way that the human eye wasn't designed to process. One moment he was hovering at the far end of the platform. The next, he was a cyan streak, trailing a wake of compressed air that ripped at Ryan's clothes and hair from twenty feet away.
Girls in the front row covered their eyes. Grown men leaned back in their seats. The livestreamers went silent.
Ryan stood still.
He didn't dodge. Didn't guard. Didn't move a single inch. To Derek — to everyone watching — he looked frozen. Paralyzed. A deer caught in headlights, brain short-circuited by the reality of what was about to happen to it.
Derek closed the distance. Five meters. Three. One.
"Should've forfeited, kid. Get your head checked in the next life—"
Ryan raised his hand.
Turned the dial.
Green light erupted from his body — not a flash, but a detonation, a wall of emerald radiance that swallowed the entire arena in an instant. It washed over Derek's face at point-blank range, illuminating every detail of his expression as it collapsed from triumph into something he had never felt before in his life.
Terror.
"Impossible—!"