The doors to the old foundation gymnasium groaned like a waking beast.
"It's really nice of Ben to do this," Zoe said, stepping inside, "but I can't believe he learned so much about the Laws."
Zane shouldered the door wider, his expression tight. "A rival doesn't teach his opponent. He's here to flex on us. Build aura."
The air inside was still, cool, and smelled of polished wood and ozone, a scent that still carried the ghost of cheers from the exam a few weeks prior. But no sound followed them in. Just their own footsteps and breathing.
Zoe shrugged, her eyes scanning the shadowy bleachers. "You really think you're his rival? Please. He's leagues above us." She said it without malice, a simple fact that silenced her own ego.
Zane's jaw tightened. He looked at the upper rows of plastic chairs forming a silent stadium around the empty combat floor. I can't let him beat me. I need that Hero title. That's all that matters. He took a step further into the giant court, eyes probing the darkness. "Where is he?"
A voice cut through the dimness, confident, assertive, a teacher's voice. It came from the stands. "Are you willing to do anything for strength?"
Ben was there, a silhouette leaning against the railing about halfway up. He wasn't looking at them; he was looking at the empty arena below, as if seeing a future battle already playing out.
Zane froze. Will I do anything for strength? I have too much to lose… and far more to gain. I shall—
CLUNK.
The overhead lights blasted on without warning, flooding the gymnasium with harsh white light. All three of them flinched.
Adin stood by the wall panel, hand still on the switch, his oversized hat casting a dramatic shadow. He blinked at them, his expression one of genuine, frantic concern. "Why are you guys in the dark? Did you start already? With a Law?" He sounded genuinely afraid he'd missed a crucial data point.
Ben pushed off from the railing, his face a mask of annoyed amusement. "Nah. You just ruined my perfect introduction." He began descending the steps, his movement fluid. "But since you're all finally here, we can start."
Ben reached the floor, the gym lights making the shadows of the bleachers look like deep, empty sockets. He stopped a few feet from them, his gaze moving from Zane's defensive scowl to Zoe's open curiosity to Adin's vibrating focus.
"Everything I will teach you, Korin taught me," Ben said, his voice flat. "He teaches by breaking you. He gives you a puzzle that feels impossible until you stop fighting it and start listening." A pause. "I'm not Korin. I'm not going to break you. I'm going to show you how the machine works so you can break it yourself."
He walked to the center of the sparring circle and turned. "The Laws aren't steps. They're layers. You think you learn one, then the next. Wrong. They're all happening at once. Every time you use your power, you're using all six. Most of you are just using them badly—not to their full extent."
"Prove it," Zane said, the challenge automatic.
Ben didn't smile. He just lifted his hand. A single, perfect sphere of water condensed above his palm. It was so clear it seemed to hold the light.
"Law One. Control the flow, don't just open the tap." A steady stream of water began looping between his hands, calm and endless.
"Law Two," Ben said, and the water snapped into a sharp, jagged icicle mid-air. "Intent precedes manifestation. You don't ask. You command."
He let the icicle shatter on the floor.
"You know those two. But the complexity only gets thicker from here. And with it, more power."
"Law Three. Your core is a muscle. Train it, it grows. Tear it, it's gone." He tapped the right side of his chest. "You feel the burn here, you're learning. Every time you channel essence, you're getting stronger. Your body uses essence to strengthen your muscles, your bones, even your organs."
Adin was writing furiously, muttering. "Muscle hypertrophy analogies… core stamina… fascinating…"
"Will you stop?" Zoe hissed, elbowing him. "He's going too fast, and you're writing a book! I'm trying to listen."
"I am listening! I am listening and codifying!" Adin shot back, not looking up.
Zane just watched, his eyes fixed on the water sphere in Ben's hand. He held up his own hand. A tiny, controlled flame—no bigger than a match head—flickered to life above his palm. It didn't roar. It didn't spread. It just was. A river of fire, not a flood. He concentrated and felt his core activating, like working out a muscle.
Ben gave Zane a single, slow nod. "Good."
"Can I continue?" Ben asked, like a professor checking his class.
Zoe snapped her attention back. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead."
"Law Four. Resonance and Dissonance. Frequency and vibration." Ben lifted both hands now. In one, a sphere of water glimmered. In the other, a shard of ice hovered. "This one was the hardest for me. It's not about controlling how much essence to use. It's about sensing the vibrational state of essence itself and shaping it—tuning it to an object, to another person's power, or even your own. Don't focus on the power of essence; focus on the frequency it makes, and shape it to your will. Match its frequency, you amplify it. That's Resonance. Oppose it, you disrupt it. That's Dissonance."
He looked coldly at the shard of ice flickering next to the sphere of water. "Change it. Create something new. That's both."
Zoe blinked. "Okay, can we slow down for real? What does the frequency of essence even mean?"
"It's like Law Three, but instead of strengthening your core with mind-core connection, you're tuning your awareness to the essence particles around you. You feel their vibration, then you nudge it. Speed it up, slow it down, cancel it out. Simple."
"Simple, my ass. It's amazing how incredibly complex and deep the Laws go," Adin muttered, finally looking up from his notes, a faintly overwhelmed expression on his face.
"Almost sounds like you're enjoying it," Zoe said, rolling her eyes with deep sarcasm.
She'd been a kid with great talent from the jump. She never learned anything formally; she just knew how to use her powers and invented new ways of using them along the way. She didn't like following rules or books. She used her essence however she saw fit.
Unlike Adin, who found his answers in knowledge and books written by great people.
A few hours later.
The gymnasium air was charged—not with the chaos of a brawl, but with the sharp, focused intensity of a laboratory experiment about to ignite.
Ben stood alone at the center of the sparring circle. Adin, Zoe, and Zane surrounded him, each at a cardinal point ten paces away. Sweat dotted their brows. The mental grind of the last few hours—the relentless focus on flow, on intent, on the burning feedback from their cores—was written on their faces. But their stances were steady. Their eyes were clear.
"Only rule: say the Law you use in any attack," Ben said. "Start."
They moved.
Zane went first, not with a roaring fireball, but with a focused beam of white-hot flame—a laser cut from a blowtorch. "Law Four!" He channeled his rage into a narrow, furious stream, and Law Two gave the command with pure intent: Pierce.
Ben didn't deflect. He sidestepped, but the heat seared the air where he'd been. Fast learner, he thought, surprised.
At the same moment, Zoe's hands flickered. Dozens of threads, sharp as monofilament wire and glowing with hard light, shot from her fingertips—not in a net, but in a coordinated volley, aiming to pin his shadow to the floor. Law Two: Intent. Restrain.
Adin didn't attack. He focused inward, his eyes glazing over. "Third Law." He pushed his essence not outward, but through his own nervous system, accelerating his reflexes, heightening his perception. He was the observer, the diagnostician, waiting for an opening.
Ben flowed in a majestic flip between the flame and the threads. A shield of ice blossomed from his left arm to block Zane's next sustained white-flamed jet. The heat kept increasing, the flames roaring against his shield.
"Second Law!" Ben called out confidently. The ice didn't just sit there; it defrosted strategically, the water vapor suffocating the flame's wildness.
Zoe's threads latched onto the edge of his shield. With a sharp tug of her will, she tried to wrench it from his grasp. Ben let it shatter, but as the pieces fell, he commanded each shard. "Second and Third Law! Top speed. Fragment. Redirect."
Ben called his move, revealing his cards confidently. After hours with Korin, this was child's play to him. He felt the power the core provided for his body and zapped toward Zoe's direction, lifting shards of ice sharp as chef's knives.
Zoe panicked and called forth a thread wall in its path, which didn't do much as the ice shards stabbed into the thread wall, penetrating it, each one poking a hole in Zoe's oversized clothes and nailing her to the arena wall.
Zane snarled, abandoning his flames. The tattoo on his right forearm—wings of an angel—glowed crimson. He held out his arms like an eagle and started sprinting toward Ben's location.
Adin waited for his turn, but when he realized there wouldn't be one, he thought, I must attack too. I can't let ignorance and brute force win over calculation and brains.
He was ready. The power of his essence still circulated from his core to his nervous system to his muscles, strengthening his whole body like a single solid piece.
Ben noticed the power of the essence radiating from Adin's body—until he couldn't. Adin totally disappeared. Focused on Zane's next attack, Ben failed to foresee Adin's action. He suddenly felt a chilling aura from his left and a voice whispering in his ear.
"Second Law—Manifestation: Super-Human."
A punch stronger than the mass of a mountain rode its way toward Ben's defenseless face.
But it wasn't the first time Ben had to think on his feet. Back when he was training with Aria in this same gymnasium, he'd had to deal with much stronger and faster attacks. He wasn't the type to get nervous or fear anymore. He'd been through a lot of fights and hardship since then. Aria said the trick was not to blink when an attack was coming your way—open your eyes, visualize the trajectory, and deflect.
Adin wasn't his only opponent. Zane wasn't far behind. He activated a new tattoo power; two wings grew from his back as he started riding the wind above surface level, a fire fist headed toward Ben.
Ben noticed all sides of the arena. In a freezing moment, he could feel three essence forms coming his way. Adin was the closest to him by far, but with Zane's speed in the air, he knew he'd get hit moments after. To add to that, Ben's perception noticed Zoe getting up and sending a thread whip his way, hoping to tie him up for Zane and Adin's attacks to land. The whole arena was chaotic with essence wilding in the air.
"Very good. But even with perfect teamwork, you must still get stronger individually."
He needed to evade all those attacks. Only he didn't really need to move much. Ben turned his face, looking at Adin's punch coming inches from his face, calmly calculating his spatial next move. Only this one wasn't meant to defend.
It was meant to end the fight.
"Sixth Law. Absolute Zero."
The world locked.
A wave of conceptual cold, deeper than temperature, erupted from Ben's core. The very air crystallized with a sound like a thousand windows shattering at once. Every attack froze in its trajectory—Adin's fist, Zane's flaming dive, Zoe's whipping thread—suspended in perfect, silent stasis. The rampant essence in the air itself solidified, glittering like frozen dust in the stadium lights. The temperature plummeted to an unstable, impossible degree.
Ben looked around at his frozen friends, all caught in the motion of coming for his head. He calmly took a single step back, evading the crystallized lattice of their combined assault.
On his mark, the conceptual command released.
The air thawed back to its original state in a gasp of condensing moisture, as if time had stuttered and resumed. Momentum reclaimed its debt.
Adin's punch couldn't be withdrawn. It hammered into the empty space where Ben's head had been, the force throwing him off balance. Zane, moving too fast to stop mid-dive, crashed headfirst into Adin's shoulder. The impact sent Zane spinning to the ground, where he clutched his head with a pained groan.
Zoe's delayed thread whip, now without a target, snapped through the air and wrapped tightly around Adin's arm, pinning it to his torso. He stumbled, completely entangled.
Ben looked at the chaos unfolding around him with great amusement. "Yeah, my mistake. You still have some work to do on your teamwork," he said, a smirk spreading into a short, sharp laugh he didn't bother to hide.
Zane got up from the floor, holding his forehead. "What the hell was that?" he gritted out, his voice thick with pain and frustration.
Ben's smile was a sharp thing. "Just a powerful concept I learned from someone else," he said.
The words hung in the air of the training hall. Zane rubbed his forehead, the ache pulsing where he'd collided with Adin. Zoe slowly retracted her thread whip from around Adin's arm, the shimmering essence dissolving back into her fingertips.
"The Sixth Law is too overpowered?" Adin flexed his jaw, the phantom sensation of his own punch missing still vibrating up his arm. "But how? You didn't touch anyone, but we all stopped."
"Didn't have to," Ben said, his tone shifting from amused to instructive. "All I did was sacrifice the essence stored in my core. Law Six—Conceptual Weight—means I can achieve any concept with my power as long as I pay a certain price."
Zane stared. "That's… not how essence works."
"Yeah, that's why you have to study the Laws in order. To understand a Law, you must master the previous one," Ben said, holding their certainty in check.
On the other side of the academy, Professor Keren walked the quiet corridors toward the big brown door of Director Korin's office. Her footsteps were steady, deliberate. She came looking for answers, and she wasn't leaving without them.
Two knocks. Sharp. Controlled.
A masculine voice from inside: "Come in."
She pushed the door open, ready to come in hot, questions raining down like a storm. She had reports. She had concerns. She had words.
Then she stepped inside and stopped.
Korin sat at his desk, stamping important contract papers like the bureaucrat he never wanted to be. But that's not what caught her attention.
Behind him, on the floor, sat a basket the size of a small child. Filled with chocolates and presents wrapped in bright, colorful paper. A framed picture of the two of them, laughing at something, somewhere, months ago, leaned against it. And next to the basket, hiding behind the desk, which was spilling over with deep red petals, stood a bouquet of roses so large it was ridiculous. Extravagant. Him.
"Oh, baby," she breathed, the words escaping before she could stop them.
Korin looked up. His eyes followed hers to the basket, and a slow smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Not smug. Just... pleased with himself.
He set down his pen and rose, rounding the desk toward her.
"You weren't supposed to see that yet," he said.
She tore her gaze away from the flowers. "Yet?"
He shrugged, hands sliding into his pockets. "Two years is two years. Figured I'd do something about it."
"Korin..." She didn't know what to say. That never happened.
"What? A man can't spoil his woman?"
She shook her head, a laugh caught somewhere in her throat. She reached out, fingers brushing a rose petal. Real. Expensive. He'd gone all out.
"This is too much."
His voice dropped, quieter now. "Only way I know how."
Something passed between them. A shared history. A private joke that didn't need words. For a second, she almost forgot why she'd come.
Then she remembered.
She stepped back, composing herself. "No. No, you don't get to do this."
He tilted his head. "Do what?"
"Be sweet. Distract me." She leveled her gaze at him. "I came here for a reason, and you are not gonna dodge your way out of this one."
He stepped closer instead of backing away. "I like it when you're aggressive."
The air shifted. Grew warmer. More quiet. Too comfortable.
Keren's face changed. Serious now. Not angry. Just done playing.
She sat down in the chair across from his desk. "Baby."
He looked at her for a long second. Then he sat too, across from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Present. Waiting.
"I felt something today," she said. "A surge. Essence. Primal." She watched his face carefully. "That was you, wasn't it? Today, earlier this morning . I heard Caius came through. Was it him?"
Korin's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes went still.
"He tried to hurt Ben," Korin said quietly.
Keren waited.
"We were in the basement. He cornered him. Said things. The kind of things powerful people say to make kids feel small." Korin's jaw tightened. "Ben didn't flinch. He didn't back down. Just stood there, looking at Caius like he was ready for any outcome."
"And?"
"And Caius raised his hand. A strike. Enough to kill, enough to break. He was serious. All to teach a false lesson." Korin's voice dropped. "He never got to throw it."
Keren leaned forward. "What did you do?"
"I stopped him." A pause. "One hit. He was on the ground before he understood what happened. I stood over him and told him if he ever came near my students again, near Ben again, I'd finish what I started."
The room was very quiet.
Keren studied him. The way his hands rested on his knees. The way his breathing hadn't changed. The way he said my students like it meant something more.
"You hit the Fourth Hero of Essence," she said slowly. "For a boy."
"Yes."
"Korin—"
"He's not just a student."
She stopped.
Korin met her eyes. "You didn't see him, Keren. The way he stood there. No fear. No running. Just... waiting. Like he'd been waiting his whole life for someone to finally take a swing." He shook his head. "That kid has nothing. No family. No name. No one in his corner. And he still stood his ground against a man who could've erased him."
Keren was quiet.
"So yes," Korin said. "I hit him. And I'd do it again."
A long moment passed. Then Keren spoke, her voice softer now.
"I'm not saying he doesn't deserve someone in his corner." She reached out, placing her hand on his knee. "I'm saying you need to be careful. You can't open wars from this position. The Council's already watching. One wrong move and—"
"He's like a son to me."
The words hung in the air. Simple. Heavy.
Keren's hand stilled.
Korin looked at her. "Clara and Thorne are my family. You know that. But that boy..." He trailed off, then shook his head slowly. "I would fight another planet for him."
She didn't speak. Just watched him.
"I know the risks," he said. But Ben—" He paused. "He's going to be stronger than all of us. Stronger than me. And when that day comes, I need him to know someone believed in him before he was worth believing in."
Keren held his gaze. Then, slowly, she nodded.
"Just... be careful," she whispered.
"I will."
She looked at the basket behind him. At the roses. At the man she'd chosen.
"Happy early anniversary," she said quietly.
A small smile broke through the weight on his face. "You too."