The same story played out repeatedly throughout the hand-eye coordination test. For the most part, I was left free to perform how I’d expect of myself. The machine would buzz, a ball would launch, I’d catch it and drop it in the correct basket. It was a simple test.

But sporadically, that same mental disconnect would occur. My mind would stutter, leaving my body out of sync with my thoughts. My fingers would close too late. I’d turn too slow. My timing would slip, dropping balls into the wrong basket.

Ultimately, the test only went on for a few minutes and the sabotage ended up feeling more like a petty annoyance than an actual threat to my success. The only frustrating part was that it didn’t occur often enough to gather any concrete data on it. My best guess was around half a second of mental lag, but that was hardly accurate. I started noticing a tiny pulse in my brain towards the end, like the throb of a migraine without the pain, but it was so faint I wasn’t sure if I imagined it.

Worse, I had no clue who the perpetrator was. The room was too chaotic, too full of people moving around, myriad voices blending into a cacophony underscored by the whirring and whining of the testing machines.

I was watchful as we moved on to the next test, but it again amounted to nothing. My only hope was that they still targetted me, so I could keep getting a feel for what their power was doing.

My next test consisted of dodging foam balls from a launcher, as I’d seen Billy do earlier. He’d made it look easy for the most part, but it turned out to be challenging even without the mental lag periodically messing with me. The balls moved fairly fast, and it wasn’t easy to discern their precise target until they’d already crossed half the distance. It became a guessing game, slowly learning the trajectory, gauging the speed, adapting to how the balls travelled. It was hard not to enjoy myself, and I’d almost forgotten I was supposed to be on guard when it happened.

There was a pulse in my head, that painless throb I’d noted before. I barely had a moment to register that before the launcher gave its tell, the shutter that actually fired the balls winking closed. It whined, and I knew it would fire at any moment.

Time to put my theory to the test.

The shutter opened. A blur shot out.

I felt the mental lag as I moved to the side, my legs reacting a fraction of a second later than I meant them to, my torso leaning out of the way slower than I commanded.

The ball zipped by my head and struck the net behind me with a soft thump.

A grin split my lips, 20% taunting the saboteur and 80% because I felt like a fucking badass. I looked around, making sure that they, wherever they were, could see my challenge.

Maria was looking at me like I was a maniac, which, y’know, fair enough. But I ignored her. Had to focus.

The reflex test was practically perfect for confirming my theories on the saboteur’s power. It was all about figuring out the patterns, recognising the little tells that betrayed when the launcher was going to let loose, like the shutter. Figuring out where it was aiming wasn’t entirely guesswork, though there was some luck involved; if you waited to see where the ball was positioned when the shutter opened, you’d know where it was aimed. The trade-off was less time to dodge, but I felt it was worth it.

With the saboteur’s power having its own head-throbbing tell, adapting was a simple matter of guessing the timing of the lag. I thought I’d actually moved a little too early, if anything, and mentally adjusted my estimate. A third of a second, maybe?

Seconds passed as I waited for the next shot. This time, there was no disruption, and I made sure to keep my grin as obnoxious as possible as I dodged.

I’ve figured you out, I projected. You can’t mess with me anymore.

Naturally, they took the bait.

The only reason I didn’t regret mocking them was because I wouldn’t wish the attack they hit me with next on anyone.

The shutter clicked open, the blur appeared. I got ready to move.

And a hot knife of agony speared into my frontal lobe, dug around a bit, then sliced out a chunk of my brain. It twisted as it pulled out, scraping against the underside of my skull, leaving a hole in my forehead that dribbled bits of grey matter onto the cold ground.

Just as quick as the agony had started, it was gone as if it was never there, leaving not even an aftershock. I took a deep breath as I felt around the spot on my head, the only pain coming from the slight sting where the ball had hit me. I’d been rendered dumb, unable to move.

And yet, I was still grinning.

Maria seemed really concerned now, but I gave her a reassuring thumbs up. It didn’t change her expression, but she didn’t stop the test either. I counted that as a success.

The shutter opened once more, and again there was no disruption. I dodged the ball easily.

On the next launch, the pain returned, digging a pole covered in acid through my brain right down to the stem. But I was ready for it. The first time had taken me off guard, rooting me on the spot. This time, I willed my body to move despite the pain, twisting my torso to the side. The disconnect between my intent and action was still there, but I’d accounted for that too.

The ball hit only the empty air where my stomach had just been.

I had to fight with all I had to stay on my feet. Every instinct screamed to collapse to the ground and cradle my burning skull, because even if it wasn’t real it really fucking hurt and god damn it I was going to kick that kid’s shit in when I got my hands on them.

The rest of the test continued along those lines, and the saboteur had hit me a dozen times before it was done. Each time the pain got more intense, and the lag harder to fight through even after I figured out there was a five-second cooldown on their power. By the end they were hitting me as soon as they could, giving up on timing it to make me miss my dodge. They just wanted to hurt me.

To their credit, they were succeeding.

My head was pulsing. Every marginally loud sound was thunderous. Looking towards light raked acid-dripping claws over my cranium.

If I wasn’t careful, I might never be able to wipe the grin off my face again.

I was no psychological professional, but I was starting to build a mental profile on the saboteur. My first data point had been inconclusive. Targeting the top examinees could have been down to any number of reasons, but I felt two options were the most likely: spite towards people who were better, or ruthless pragmatism to take out the competition.

But the way they’d escalated after I’d brushed off their power that first time? That pointed to pride. The inability to accept that someone had won a small victory over them. Further, if they were ruthless, they would’ve moved on. It made no sense to focus on one person if their goal was to try and eliminate as much competition as possible.

So, prideful and spiteful. Self-important and vicious enough to not only take offence to someone daring to foil them, but to keep fucking with them afterward, to put them in their place, to punish them for their audacity. Petty enough, weak enough to be fucking with people in the first place.

That narrowed things down significantly.

We moved towards my next test as a group. Maria spoke to me, but her words went in one ear and out the other. The entirety of my focus was on the hall at large, searching for people who fit the description.

A few candidates were considered and discarded. There was a guy who was struggling to catch a single ball at a hand-eye coordination station and shaking with rage about it, but it was the self-recriminating, insecure kind of fury. A girl was arguing loudly with her doctors, insisting that she couldn’t possibly have gotten a lower score than such and such, but I figured she was more focused on her so-called rival to bother with anyone else. I even reconsidered my assumptions about the Asian girl, but she was now firmly focused on the resistance test right on the other side of the room, too occupied to mess with my last test even if she’d had line of sight.

When I found the saboteur, he was both exactly what I expected and nothing like my mental image at all.

The glare that refused to stray from me was exactly as anticipated, combining with the grit teeth and his tight grip on the handles of his elliptical machine to leave me with no doubt he was my adversary. Pride oozed from his every pore as he refused to look away even after it became obvious I was staring right back. Spite burned in his eyes.

Discovering him should’ve been a moment of triumph. Instead, my grin slipped.

The kid was all skin and bone. His hair was thin, wispy. A consistency I’d expect to find on a pensioner, not a kid my age. Pale, gaunt cheeks gave his face a haunted look, like he was an angry ghost fighting to remain in the world of the living just to spite the world one last time.

If he wasn’t still sick now, he clearly had been recently.

The doctors surrounding him looked grim, like they were ready to call a stop to his test at any moment. One was constantly hovering nearby, not even bothering to assess the scores on the monitors, arms outstretched to catch the boy if he fell.

I couldn’t blame them. If I was in their position, I probably wouldn’t have let him through the door.

A lot of heroes had talked about situations like this. Sympathetic villains. Calling the kid a villain almost felt like a misnomer, just looking at his limbs shake even though his elliptical machine was clearly on the lowest setting, but that was the whole point: sometimes people had understandable (if twisted) reasons for doing bad things, reasons that made you want to go easy on them, let them off with a warning.

Punishing them felt like kicking someone when they were down. You could easily imagine how someone in that situation might develop disdain for things like honour and fairness. It was easy to forget what he’d done, pity fighting against common sense.

But they’d still done bad things, and statistics almost guaranteed they’d continue to do so without intervention. More often than not, they’d escalate. The boy’s wretched state tugged on the heart strings, but I had to put that aside and think: if he continued down this path, what could he do? What could someone spiteful and selfish enough to sabotage other kids his age do with a power that let him mess cause excruciating pain with nothing more than a look?

Just by looking at him, I could tell he wasn’t going to pass the medical test regardless of his efforts. Even if he managed to make everyone in this room disqualify themselves somehow—and I’d yet to see anyone in here get disqualified at all—there was no way he was taking part in the practical. Some might say that was punishment enough.

I started walking toward him.