Marquise’s demonstration had made me realise something that seemed extremely important, and I wasn’t even sure she realised she’d done it. I had the odd feeling she’d overestimated my progress with figuring out my soul in some areas, while misunderstanding it in others. We weren’t the exact same, after all. We couldn’t be.

  My discovery, such as it was, was pretty simple: there was such a thing as a resting state for my soul. For years now, power signals had been a constant in my life. For most of that time, it hadn’t been much of a bother, beyond being a constant reminder that other people had powers and I did not. As it wasn’t a detriment to my life, I hadn’t even thought about trying to turn it off. If anything, my attitude was the opposite—I’d wanted to grow my signal sense, thinking there was a path to power there of its own.

  I’d been right, in the end. There was indeed a path to power, just not in how I’d imagined.

  In that obsession, it had never occurred to me that sensing other signals wasn’t necessarily the default state. I was starting to think now that I’d been subconsciously keeping it active for so long that it really had become automatic. I’d started plotting the path I would take by accident. That was the best explanation I had, at least.

  But now I knew I could direct it to focus on a specific soul, and delve deep. It exhausted me for some reason, but it was proof that I didn’t have to take in every signal around me at the same time. And, by the same token… I didn’t have to focus on any other soul at all. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions here, but I figured I could direct my attention exclusively to my own soul, shutting others out.

  It left me with an emotion I wasn’t sure how to name. There was a lightness, like something had been lifted from my shoulders. Relief, I supposed. But it was tinged by a simultaneous, swoop in my stomach, like butterflies had broken in and were having a swell old time. Embarrassment, because I should’ve figured this out way before now. I’d been so tunnel visioned on the idea that my power was going to come from sensing other signals, that I hadn’t really stopped to examine my own signal in any depth.

  Some of Marquise’s words came to mind, then.

  “Take greater concern over your own soul than others,” she’d said, calling it a hint.

  So maybe she did understand what she was showing me, I thought wryly. Still, that odd feeling remained, nagging at the back of my mind, telling me she didn’t have the full picture of what was going on. Her advice had just so happened to apply.

  The problem with all this was, the only time I’d really been able to interact with my own signal/soul was when I’d been knocked unconscious by unwittingly exhausting it, or when Marquise had plunged me into that same state through some technique I wasn’t about to ask her to teach me. Only when my other senses had been denied to me had I been able to contact my own soul.

  Which makes sense, I guess. How do you feel something immaterial when you’ve got so many material senses feeding you information all the time? It’s no wonder my brain’s always trying to interpret soul stuff through my regular senses; it has no other context to work with.

  There was no organ corresponding to powers. No special place that a piece of power testing equipment had to focus on to get an X-factor rating for the Shimada Scale. A power signal could be felt at any point of the body, as long as you had the right tools for the job.

  With that in mind, it was a wonder the ‘soul’ explanation for powers wasn’t more popular. Even if it felt like we barely understood even the surface level of what was happening with these supernatural abilities, it was still clear they interfaced with our conscious minds in one undeniable way: revelations. Personal realisations that tied up excess energy—whatever that actually meant in practice—into a new aspect that helped improve our base power in some way sounded very spiritual, but it had been kind of turned scientific.

  Here, it felt kind of like I’d had a Revelation of my own. Of course, there was no shift in my soul. No excess energy bound into a new facet of my ability.

  Not automatically, anyway. I was going to have to do it myself.

  To my horror and chagrin and regret, it turned out to be fairly simple, now that I knew it was possible. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It just… wasn’t a complex task. Like lifting a heavy weight, it didn’t require a genius to do it. Merely a bit of strength and the right form.

  I closed my eyes. Evened my breaths. Loosened my posture. Centred myself. Directed all my attention within.

  The rain pattering against my head didn’t help. An icy chill fumbled its way through my body. Signals surrounded me on all sides, a hundred different souls singing with power. If I was exhausted as I had been earlier, I don’t think I would’ve been able to manage it.

  Tapping into that same sense of focus that had allowed me to delve so deeply into Vixen’s signal under my own power, I directed it inwards, forcing myself to look towards my own soul. My other sense faded—not anywhere near as much as they had under Marquise’s tender care. A mild dimming, rather than total blackout. It was enough.

  I felt my soul then. Faintly at first, but clearer with every passing second. It started off in turmoil, stretching itself all over the place to try and resonate with all those signals at the same time. As I focused, it began to calm. Little by little, the feeling of souls outside my own body started to fade from my consciousness.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Time passed. Probably not long. The rain kept me grounded in the present, somewhat. Every couple of seconds, a drop of water would dribble down the bridge of my nose. There was no shutting that out, no matter how much I wanted to. The urge to reach up and swipe it away rose each time, but I resisted.

  Eventually, my soul settled. It was… frayed. Limited to the bounds of my body as it was, it still found a way to feel malformed. All that time spent constantly reaching out must have warped it out of place. Would I be able to repair it? That remained to be seen. I was sure I’d figure it out.

  A long, slow breath escaped me as I opened my eyes. Marquise was watching me, one eyebrow raised.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Give me a moment.”

  “What’s going on?” Ashika asked, beside me. Her signal had faded again, but this time through no outside interference, it was just halfway through building up once more. She must have gone still at some point.

  “Just figured something out, is all,” I assured her with a smile. My voice sounded distant. My body felt different, too. More… here. Grounded. A small part of me thought it was nice, not being able to sense any signals around me.

  But it was greatly outsized by the majority of me that wanted to know how many villainous bastards were going to get their asses kicked today.

  My focus spread out once more. I liked to imagine it erupted from my body like an aura of power, but it was undoubtedly nowhere near so dramatic, to anyone who could sense such things. Regardless, I threw my focus towards the hideout, keeping a small part of me back to ensure my soul wasn’t constantly reaching out with reckless abandon, complicating my sense with data I didn’t need right now.

  With a pulse, I counted eighteen villains in the lair this time. Mostly in the same spots, though there was now an extra person along with the one who’d previously been alone in the corner. Four bunched up, presumably next to the hostages. One on each of the main loading doors. A few on the catwalk above. The rest spread out.

  That wasn’t enough. The details of their powers weren’t important right now, and I wanted more than just the guys who were active. I thought of the technique Marquise had displayed, how she’d ‘zoomed in’ on one soul. I thought of when she’d had them in a ring around me, despite still being able to feel their actual locations, while the rest of the world in my range was shut out. I thought of the gaps in that circle, showing the people in the warehouse I’d missed. Some of them would’ve been the villains, inactive for whatever reason. Others weren’t.

  With one part of my attention on my soul, and the rest on the warehouse, I went in the complete opposite direction. Instead of zooming in and looking deeper, I zoomed out and looked wider. My soul seemed to ripple, then went wispier, more translucent.

  At the same time, I felt a repeat of that sensation I’d gone through when Marquise had first hijacked control over my soul, but on a lesser scale. My consciousness spread out like a cloud, maintaining a connection to my body and physical sensations this time. I draped myself over the warehouse, and I felt the souls within. The active ones were most substantial. Brighter, to use visual vocabulary.

  And there were dimmer ones, too. Inert, perhaps unconscious. I didn’t bother using a pulse this time, though I could still feel myself weakening. There was a strain on my soul even from this; I could feel it starting to resist the hold I had on it, and I didn’t understand why. I was starting to think I was going to have to suck up my pride and ask Marquise about that.

  But it was a problem for later. Now, I focused on interpreting the information my soul was gathering for me. My brain was even less accustomed to the data it was receiving, and I felt a sharp spike of pain behind my eyes. Ice dripped down my brain stem. My jaw clenched.

  The best way to handle it was to count through the number of data sets I was gathering, and that was a simple enough task. With that, I could surmise there were 29 people in the warehouse in total, and I relayed that to Marquise.

  “Good,” was all she said. “What else?”

  It took some more doing to plot their locations on my mental map, not helped by the fact I was far from the spot I’d been in when I’d first sought out their locations. My soul started to shudder, but I managed to give a decent account, based on each soul’s relative location compared to where I was currently standing. They’d be able to use that, right?

  “It should be actionable,” Marquise said. My eyes were still closed, but I heard one of her goons move away and speak quietly, presumably into a comms device. “Tell me which are villains and which are hostages.”

  That brought me up short for a moment, but I refused to back down from the challenge. I already had an idea there were at least eighteen villains, and I turned my attention to the largest cluster of souls in the warehouse. There were eleven people in one place, perhaps their equivalent of the office area. Four I was vaguely familiar with already from the taste of their powers, seven I wasn’t, clustered together in two distinct groups.

  Of the seven, three were small in both breadth, depth, and actual size, and I was fairly confident that meant they were children. They were less substantial than the people around them, harder to get a read on.

  The rest of the people in the warehouse were more spread out, making it difficult to impossible for them to be hostages, since the other villains surely wouldn’t allow their captives free roam of the base.

  Sure in my assessment, I gave it to Marquise.

  “Twenty-two villains and seven hostages,” Marquise summarised. Then, without hesitation: “Begin the operation.”

  Her people sprung into action so swiftly it took me off guard. A boom thundered through the area, snapping me out of my concentration. I lost the grip on my soul, and power signals flooded back into my senses, dozens at once. Easily over a hundred. It was only in the passive state, but with the previous tranquillity I’d been in, the activity hit me like a physical force. I gasped, taking a step to the side as if I could physically escape from the noise.

  And then it all faded away again, as a foreign soul shielded mine. I opened my eyes to find Marquise watching me, and she gestured towards the warehouse once she saw she had my attention.

  “I think it would be good for you to see this,” she said.

  Ashika was still at my side, looking between me and Marquise. She’d lost her charge once more, and there was a lost expression on her face. I took a step towards her and leaned my weight on her shoulder. She repositioned herself to hold me by reflex, then we turned to together watch Marquise’s people at work.

  superhero school. That was what I set out to do in 2022 when I started this story. I did a bunch of worldbuilding, planned out characters I became very fond of, and put down a vague roadmap laying out how I wanted this story to proceed over a rather long period. I was excited to write it.

  definitely don't want to write a scenario where Emmett and co are explicitly aware of what's going on from so early on.

  Rewrite?