The path back to the dorms always took the students past the monuments. Those statues were everywhere. Stone poses of previous notable heroes, enshrined as constant reminders. In the 21st century, superheroism was the opium of the masses. Billions in the entertainment sector alone funded the glamorous lives of the top thousand registered capes. Each was a flame to impressionable moths.

The underdog story always sold well. A small-town gifted with a younger sibling to take care of, sent to the big city on a scholarship after surviving high school. That was the keyword, ‘survive’. That’s how film always framed it. As if three years of a teenager’s society was a difficult affair. People survived hurricane Majestica, when a gifted whale slammed the coast with a telekinetic hurricane. They survived Nine Eleven, when a gifted zealot detonated a micro-singularity inside one of the towers. Lyssa survived Rachminau. The whale and the zealot had a plan, but the worst disaster of the century was caused by someone with no plan at all. Someone ostensibly insane.

Lyssa had to wonder what her plan was. She wanted peace, so she signed up for a job that would take her in the opposite direction of it. Every time one of the many screens on campus played some promo or soundbite of Victory, her heart would race. While other students were inspired by heroes, she was inspired by spite and rage. Rage made her walk quicker on those paved roads before she went up in flames hearing about the big three’s exploits.

In the gardens she found a measure of tranquility. She loved watching the vines and flowers brighten as the gardeners stimulated their life forces. Sitting under the shade she could almost remember a time when this feeling was the norm.

“So why do you hate Victory?” Lian asked in one of their sessions. She had been in Lyssa’s head too many times not to know.

Lyssa answered. “When Victory leapt into the air to intercept that meteor, one of the pieces killed my family. The nation hailed her. But almost no one talked about the people that died from the pieces.”

“But if she hadn’t done that, the meteor would have done far more damage.”

“I know. It’s illogical. It doesn’t make sense. But how do you bear down on a young girl and say, ‘This was for the greater good’ and expect her to understand? You wake up surrounded by fire and destruction and sirens. You look up and see a ball of rock and one person jumping towards it. The next thing you know you’ve lost everything, and the world is calling Victory.”

“I… I don’t know. It all makes sense as a thought experiment.”

“It always does. Hero ethics makes numerical sense. Switch the tracks if it meant the train would run over less people. The thought experiment stops before the part where someone has to explain to families that their loved ones died by the hand of another. For the greater good.”

“Rachminau sent that meteor,” Lian said gently. “But…”

“Every event has one that precedes another, doesn’t it? Where does the blame go? Someone tied people to those tracks. Someone sent that train. Someone left it unattended.”

“What if Victory didn’t know what would happen?” Lian said. “How could she have known where the pieces would go?”

“She couldn’t,” Lyssa said. “But what do you think would have happened if a professional hero appeared before the press and said ‘I didn’t know’ to a poorly managed disaster?”

“They would be eaten alive,” Lian said. “The public doesn’t take well to ignorance. They would say ‘It’s your job to know better’. They would have no sympathy.”

“I realized this a while back. You can’t save everyone. Superheroism is about saving as many as possible, and blaming the villain that makes the most sense to blame for the people you missed along the way. So the public know who to praise and who to hate. Because if they doubted the efficacy of superheroes and stopped supporting people like Victory or Peregrine or Giantsbane, things would be much worse. My victimhood is a silent statistic. I guess this was why I stopped following superhero media. I’ve already seen it all.”

Lian smiled, which worried Lyssa.

“That didn’t sound crazy to you?” Lyssa asked.

“Isn’t that normal though? Questioning if you’re doing the right thing? If the world makes sense the way it is?”

“Maybe.”

“I think it’s proof that you’re not crazy.”

“Thanks. I needed to hear that.”

“A couple closing notes,” Lian said as she stretched to relieve the stress of sitting for so long. “Is she still bothering you? The dark self?”

“She doesn’t like you. And she’s been whispering to me more. Telling me what other people are thinking. I block her out. She doesn’t dare exert herself, not with the increased psychic security around the school.”

“That’s good. How about we move this from a daily to a weekly thing, then.”

Lyssa shrugged.

“I’d be fine with that,” she said.

“I need to start prepping for the tournament.”

The games. Lyssa had forgotten about them. They were coming in a couple weeks. And she had barely trained outside of those Gift Application exercises.

Lian gathered the leaves and petals around them into a rapidly spinning ball with her telekinesis. Then she let them all go, raining the area around them with color.

“I’ve been working on my control,” she said. “It’s much harder than it looks.”

“I can imagine,” Lyssa said. She caught a petal in her palm. It smelled of the spice of autumn, dead but reminiscent of summer.

“It’s like having a thousand fingers, pushing mass the direction you want it to go.”

“What happens if that mass fights back?” Lyssa asked.

“You’d feel it. The rebound,” Lian said. “It hurts. People think being able to move things with your mind means you can control the entire battlefield. The truth is it’s like saying having fingers must mean you can play the piano. Are you competing in the tournament?”

“Yes.”

Lian smirked. “Then that’s all I’m going to say about my powers. We might have to go against each other.”

Lyssa had her own work cut out for her. Her roommates have been frequenting the gym at the end of their classes. She always had an excuse. Either the week’s Gift Application exercise was too rough, or she just wasn’t feeling well. She had been idling far too much.

The games were a whole class of event on their own. Violence under rule. Safe, controlled. No spectator sport could compete with any competition involving gifted. The games would not be fair, they would never be balanced, and the audience loved it that way.

She found Amelia in one of the campus’s surface level gyms, catching a lot of staring from the traditionally muscled gifted in the room. Amelia was on the magnet bars, benching a suspended mass that pushed off the electromagnet in the ceiling. Upon seeing Lyssa, she stopped.

“Finally decided to come?” Amelia said as she wiped herself off with a towel.

“Where’s Penny and Carrie?”

“Physical strength is not all that necessary for manipulators like them. They just need practice and control. I need a bit of everything.” Amelia tapped the digital readout beside her seat. “It is not as good as the one back home.”

Lyssa looked closer.

“That’s a hundred thousand pounds! How strong are you?”

“Insect strength,” Amelia said. “In actuality I am out of shape. Nobody here seems to believe me though.”

The other students turned away upon hearing themselves be mentioned.

“I think they’re just intimidated,” Lyssa said quietly.

“I am just a moth animalian. Have you ever seen a stag beetle? Blimey, those guys are something else.” She continued her repetitions. The machine audibly strained. “So? Are you here to stare or to work?”

“The latter. I was useful for two minutes in Tobias’s practicum. I can’t be a different kind of hero if I can’t compete with normal heroes.”

Amelia extended the machine to its highest point and turned it off. The mechanisms powered down with an electric whine.

“I will spot you,” she said. “I need a break anyway.”

“Weird question.”

“What?”

“If a train was coming to two tracks with five people tied to the current track and one to the other, would you pull the lever to switch it?”

Amelia laughed.

“Is that why you look so bothered?” She asked. She looked up for a moment. “When she was younger than I am now, my mother fought someone named the Vaudevillain. He had done something comically similar to that ridiculously clichéd gedanken experiment, taunting her with the fact that she must make a choice. My mother made sure no one was onboard. Then she derailed the train. Broke her exoskeleton in half of her body and saved everyone. She had to spin herself a healing cocoon and spend a month recuperating.”

“I see…”

“There are moments where we cannot think, we simply have to act. My mother said the most important thing they taught you in Super Ethics was how to recognize those moments. If the survivors hate you afterward, then at least they are alive to hate at all.”

“I… I don’t know if I can agree to that.”

Amelia patted her on the back.

“I don’t know either,” she said. “But we have the next four years to figure out what we agree with.”