1.29 – Sunshines and Hugs

It felt like no time passed at all, but already it was Wednesday. In the end, he did go back home and spent some time resting up, but school didn’t wait for him to refresh completely, and on Monday he was already sparring once again.

Deadlock separated them into new groups once again, but Nathan won quite easily. His latest match had him square up against some two men that he never talked to before, and Aiko was his colleague this time around. He quite liked fighting with her at his side. They covered each other and made short work of their opponents.

Okay, maybe he didn’t win as easily as he would have liked, but it wasn’t that difficult. Alicia was way stronger than the two. Those students that were against them had some really underwhelming powers. Actually, thinking about it, Nathan wasn’t sure whether he saw any power at all from one of them. 1-F class seemed to be a mixed bunch, and he didn’t see how a lot of the heroes here were to progress into the second semester.

The tournament, while still quite a bit away, would come sooner rather than later, and from all that he has heard, the students who showed no progress at all would be thrown out, and the ones who showed something of interest would progress to class 1-E.

Apparently, it was a usual thing to happen in the lower classes. The school had no use for weaklings, and the lower classes were there just to catch the nuggets of gold in the piles of dirt. Although Nathan didn’t feel quite as confident in his abilities, especially not after almost dying, he reckoned he was quite a bit above compared to some of the others, and hopefully he should be safe.

This class, however, didn’t focus on fighting against his other classmates.

No, this was something else entirely. They were outside on a large field, and there were target dummies in front of each and every student. Some of the students already complained about their abilities being useless in a physical combat against something of this sort, but Nathan didn’t follow that formula, and so he just listened to the teacher, trying to absorb this information that he missed several weeks of. He did study the material, but it didn’t feel like enough.

Power Advancement was an interesting class led by a B-class hero named Sunshine. She was a cheery one, constantly smiling, approaching each of the students with a smile on her face and some helpful insight on how to improve. The objective of this class, as far as Nathan understood, was to improve the capabilities of the students.

Each ability could, after all, be improved with time and focus. The superhero durability and powers that came with every single super power were only obtained after some great stress was put on… whatever provided the people here with their unique quirks.

Apparently, she was focusing on bringing that something out by getting his classmates as close to death from exhaustion as possible.

What didn’t help was that each super hero worked differently and each power required something else to become more powerful.

For Nathan, it was as simple as accumulating more money, and honestly, as much as he moaned about it, it was becoming quite easy nowadays. Okay, not easy, but it was certainly easier than whatever some of his classmates had to do in comparison.

For Alicia, it was increasing the yield of her explosions. How did somebody go about doing that? He had no idea, but she seemed to be improving under Sunshine’s guidance, as much as Nathan knew. At least… she did say that she got some praise from Sunshine, back when they talked at home this weekend.

The others, though, were not doing that great, at least in general. It would suffice to say that Sunshine’s methods seemed a bit extreme, but Nathan guessed there was nothing else a super powered person could do in their place.

He looked at his own practice dummy and wondered how he should kill time now. Sunshine only gave him a nod and didn’t even provide any assistance, and Nathan wasn’t sure whether that meant that she gave up on him or if she noticed the fact that he was improving on his own. Maybe Vermillion Strike said something to her. He hasn’t seen her since the fight in the sewers, so there was no way to be sure.

But he already knew how much he had improved. He improved exactly by $6,000 worth. $2,000 went into improving his momentum power, jumping by two levels, making it E class power.

It worked for longer now. Three times longer, to be exact, making it far more potent. If he could grab a rock and store momentum in it for such a long time, then it would definitely allow him to pack more of a punch.

Yes, he did kill the man in the sewers with this power, but that was because he basically touched his brain. He couldn’t count on that in each fight; hell, he didn’t even want to count on that.

The man was definitely not the most vile or the strongest person he would have to meet if he followed the game’s progression at least somewhat.

His next power would hopefully allow him to store momentum from something he didn’t have to touch, but he would have to see about that later. This momentum was strong, but he still wasn’t sure whether he wanted to keep going on this path or start grabbing some powers from the other power-areas and try some new synergies. He did write several dozen powers down in his notepad, but his finances simply didn’t allow him to test them all out.

His other power, though, focused on something else. It was something that would actually let him stay in a fight for longer.

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He brought it up once again, inspecting it, and felt giddy once he saw it. He didn’t use it today, yet he didn’t even let anyone know about it so far, but he reckoned he would get to use it pretty soon.

He could already imagine Alicia’s face once he’d used it. She’d be so shocked. Just the idea made him chuckle, but he stopped himself before the others looked his way and wondered ‘why is this man laughing as he’s looking at a training dummy’.

Rocked up
E+ Superpower

This power allows the user to envelop his skin in a layer of rock. This rock is flexible for the user but the outer layer is hard. Like a rock. Who would have guessed. If you didn’t, then you really shouldn’t have any power at all.

Using this power increases the user’s weight and obstructs vision by a small margin. If small parts of the rocky shell are destroyed, it takes time for them to grow back.

It was a brief description, and it left him guessing about some parts of how this power would work in reality, but the part that interested him the most was the bigger weight. If he could jump down from somewhere and envelop himself in the rock and, in the last moment, store the momentum, then the next thing he picked up or his next punch would have so much power behind them that it would surely hurt even the more powerful heroes. Vermillion Strike already seemed to feel his former punch, but that had way more momentum in it than his usual rotation of his arm kind of attacks.