It turned out the task had been intended for a blond girl on the shorter side named Helga. She had the power to turn herself into a cloud of acid-green gas that gave her a degree of control over any creature that breathed her in, so to speak. Quite apart from how long it would’ve taken her to search all the houses and track down the villainous construct on her own, her power would have granted her no advantage over it. In the end, matters would have come down to her ability to fight the villain hand-to-hand, flesh-to-metal.

Judging by the wince she gave when she set eyes on the mannequin bird thing, she had about as much faith in her ability to pass that test as I did.

It had been designed to pose an extremely difficult trial, but to someone with a different power and set of skills, it was almost trivial. As we moved on, a light-hearted debate sprung up over who could’ve passed it the fastest if they’d been the one to find the villain, and there were multiple strong contenders. Most of them got hissed at by Cat for their hubris.

All that being said, the vast majority of tasks didn’t even provide that much of a challenge.

~~~

From below, I could see all the way to a hole in the roof of what had once been a floor five levels above. Most of the floorboards had rotted away beneath it, leaving only the sturdier support beams and lonely platforms dotted around the skeletal interior of the building. On the other side of the wide building, maybe one in five planks remained in the staircase, and I wouldn’t have been at all comfortable stepping on them if I weighed a third as much as I did.

“Man, how was I supposed to do this on my own?” a boy asked beside me. He had long black hair tied up in a bun with a scrunchie, and for reasons I couldn’t fathom, he’d opted for a tracksuit that appeared to be twice his size, forcing him to loop a cord around his waist to keep the bottoms from falling down.

“I have a few ideas,” I replied absently, watching the hints of movement far above. He had the ability to set glowing ‘zones’ in the ground, and within them, he decided how much sway gravity and friction held, rendering surfaces into air hockey tables.

I pointed at the pile of abandoned scaffolding material that was hidden in one corner. “I assume they wanted you to use your power to move a bunch of materials into a position that would let you climb up to the attic. See how all the platforms are conveniently placed?”

The boy squinted. “I guess I would’ve figured that out eventually if I wasn’t on a time limit.”

“It would’ve taken a long time, and it would’ve been dangerous to boot,” I said with a nod. “Hence why it’s an A-rank.”

A girl appeared in the hole overhead, then leapt out. Her dark hair fanned out around her as she casually descended to ground level, a white box in her arms. “This what you were looking for?” she asked, icy blue eyes fixing the boy in place.

It was indeed. Retrieving that box might have taken the boy hours and a lot of work.

A girl who could fly had done it in seconds.

~~~

Julia appeared at my side in a gap between tasks where we’d slowed to a walk to let everyone recuperate, and she wasted no time.

“What are your plans if you fail to make it into Aegis Academy?” she asked.

I shot her a dirty look. “What makes you think I have any?”

“You don’t? That seems like an odd lack of planning from a boy who’s determined to throw his chances down the drain. I assumed you had backups ready.” She sighed dramatically. “So little foresight in this city, considering its name.”

“Who needs a backup plan when I’m not going to fail?”

“Cute, but I highly doubt even you believe that. At the very least, you’re setting yourself up to get the lowest score in this batch of examinees.”

“Maybe I think my written test will make up for it.”

“Oh? Then why were you shaking like a leaf during Morphosis’ briefing? That didn’t seem like the demeanour of a man with iron belief.”

“Everyone gets nervous before a big event,” I snapped, turning to glare at her.

Julia just smiled. “I didn’t take you for the delusional type, Emmett. And I’m rarely wrong about these things.”

~~~

We were breezing through the tasks, completing multiple every minute. It became a game of matching the right powers to the right task to get things done as efficiently as possible, splitting off into smaller groups that never strayed too far from the main horde. From E-ranks all the way to A-rank, we met practically no trouble.

Every time there was a break in activity, I found my gaze straying to the observation windows high above. I wondered how many proctors were watching us right now, and how many among them were heroes.

What would they be thinking of this? Would they see it as cheating? Would they be seething with jealousy that they hadn’t thought to operate this way during their own exams at whatever school they’d attended?

People must have cooperated before. I wasn’t under the impression I was some genius trailblazer, the first to ever come up with the ingenious concept of working together. But I had to doubt anything like this had ever happened in one of their practical tests. Half the class making a mockery of anything placed in their path? Surely unheard of.

I smiled as I wondered if anyone up there was looking back at me.

I hoped so.

~~~

A crowd had gathered, debating among ourselves how to safely go about lifting a car in a way that the dummy underneath wouldn’t be damaged. In the end, it was a moot point. A colossal boy with neon green hair walked up and, casual as you like, lifted the vehicle with one hand, leaving it resting on two wheels. The dummy looked none the worse for wear, the digital clock on its face still steadily counting down.

“I can hold this all day,” he said with a voice like he’d been downing pints of gravel since he was a baby. To be fair to him, it looked like it was taking him as much effort as it would for me to lift a slightly awkward cardboard box. “But I’d rather not. Please grab the stupid dummy already.”

The blond boy with the power to “see vectors”—whatever the hell that meant—flowed forward and snatched it away with hypnotically fluid movements. He stepped away from the car’s range, holding the dummy in the crook of his arm like a child would a plush toy. He adjusted his thick-framed glasses so they caught the light. “Thank you for your assistance. Though I had a solution in mind that I could have enacted by myself, it would have taken me fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds longer to gather the necessary equipment. An unacceptable delay.”

The green-haired boy said nothing, dropping the car without preamble. It hit the ground with a thud and crash, parts coming loose and spraying across the ground. With a grunt, he walked away.

“How would you have done it?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Leverage,” he said.

I waited for him to elaborate, but he too walked away.

“Sociable fellows,” I said. No one replied.

I turned to find that everyone else was walking away, too.

~~~

We stopped for a water break in a small park, greedily gulping from the bottles that had been included in our packs. It was a rare moment of peace and quiet, no one approaching me to ask where they should be or what they should be doing. A respite was welcome.

Then Julia sat down next to me.

“Have you ever heard of Loudmouth?”

“Yes,” I grumbled, already seeing where this was going. “We’re having a break right now.”

Julia waved me off and continued anyway. “It’s kinda twisted, isn’t it? A guy so desperate to get his hit of saving the day that he’d set up situations where he could play the big hero. Made millions off it, but somehow never brought himself to stop. What was it he got caught on? Paying someone to rob an old lady so he could catch them?”

“That was just one of the more famous charges because the lady turned out to be related to a big name in the Gladiator industry. He originally got caught because they found discrepancies in his tax reports, which caused them to investigate him in more depth, FYI.”

Julia snapped her fingers and pointed at me. “That was it. You have a good memory for this stuff. Shows you’ve put a lot of thought into this whole hero thing.”

“I have indeed,” I said dryly, giving her my most unimpressed stare.

“Not many people know about this part—though I’m sure you will—but he never actually earned a hero licence. He was technically a vigilante, he just had such good press that they were hesitant to take him down, and, as far as they could tell, he’d never hurt anybody. So, fuck it. Bigger fish to fry, right?”

“Uh huh. A cautionary tale, is it?”

“Something like that.”

“If you seriously think I’d ever sink so low, you don’t know me.”

“Well, yes, of course I don’t know you. I met you less than six hours ago.” She inclined her head, and an opalescent glow highlighted her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. “But I know a lot of other things. Like the fact that no one here would stick their neck out for you like you are for them. Do your fucking tasks, idiot.”

I didn’t grace that with a reply.

~~~

Everyone froze as a klaxon sounded in the distance. It echoed for a long moment.

Only when it had faded entirely did anyone move, and they did so with a skittish, nervous energy. Someone spoke, but I was too busy looking off towards the tower where the klaxon had originated from to see who.

“Guess someone’s just finished. Took longer than I expected.”

“Don’t think anyone’s dumb enough to just go straight for the tower,” someone else replied.

“We’ve barely even done a quarter circuit around the zone yet. That’s crazy.”

“I wonder how many points first place got.”

“Enough to pass, surely?”

I tuned them all out, focusing instead on my tablet. The test had gone on for at least an hour already, and we’d only completed a bare fraction of the tasks marked out on the map. There were so many dots remaining. How long would it take to get them all? There’d been no word of a time limit, but there surely had to be one. Would it be better to let everyone head to their own tasks?

I closed my eyes and willed those thoughts away.

This was the right path. It had to be. There was no room for doubt.

~~~

A girl stood with her hand against the wall, looking around as if she could see right through it.

“Right there,” she said to the boy beside her.

Of course, that was likely because she could, indeed, see right through it. Any surface she touched her hand to would become glass to her eyes, which wouldn’t have done her much good for actually finding a way into the sealed building where her task awaited. Oh, she probably could have tracked down some kind of structural weakness that’d let her get inside eventually—if nothing else, these A-rank tasks weren’t impossible. Just extremely difficult for the person they were assigned to, working alone.

“Cool. Back in a sec then,” the British lad with the shaggy brown hair said, and then he stepped through the wall like it wasn’t there.

With allies, things became much simpler.

“The red button,” the girl shouted, pressing close to the wall. Her gaze was tracking something I couldn’t see, presumably the phaser boy ambling his way along like he’d seemed wont to do so far.

After a few seconds, the girl did a little fist pump and skipped away from the wall, smiling brighter than the sun in summer. The boy returned a moment later, hands in his pockets.

“Piss easy,” he said, shooting me a thumbs up.

“Yeah, uh. Piss easy,” I said, returning the gesture with a shaky smile.

Another A-rank down. It had taken seconds.

~~~

I was standing in the centre of a wide open square at the foot of a statue of a man who apparently didn’t exist, surrounded on all four sides by stately buildings with lots of noble pillars and fancy windows. There were so many tasks in this small area that we’d decided to stop and knock them out as fast as possible by leaving a command centre—namely, me—in the middle to direct people where they needed to go.

It was the busiest I’d been all day. Not a moment went by when someone wasn’t approaching me, asking for something to do. My head was a little frazzled, I can’t lie. My mental RAM was starting to break down.

Julia, as she had got in the habit of today, was not helping.

“He’s so good at this,” she said to Billy with a sigh. “Look at how well he’s keeping everyone organised. These idiots wouldn’t know where to wipe their asses without him. It’s a tragedy that he won’t be able to attend Aegis next semester.”

Billy looked between us, wide-eyed. “That’s pessimistic.”

I couldn’t help noticing the lack of a denial there.

“I was really looking forward to having him as a classmate. I would’ve considered it a privilege. No, an honour!” Julia declared.

“You’re laying it on a little thick,” I commented, then immediately went back to assessing where the vector boy should go next.

“It would be one thing if he tried his hardest and failed. If that was the case, I could accept it as something that wasn’t meant to be. But shooting himself in the foot like this? It’s just sad, Billy. It’s just sad.”

I rolled my eyes. “I can give you another task to do, if you’re not actually going to help coordinate things.”

Of course, she ignored me.

~~~

I was part way through explaining a plan to complete another A-rank when an explosion cut through the air like the roar of some hungry predator. The ground shook in its wake, and people cried in alarm as a cloud of dust erupted in the distance, climbing until it plumed against the sky-like ceiling of the UCTZ.

In the ensuing silence, unease settled in my stomach. We all remained still, unsure what to do, unsure what to say.

A speck fell away from one of the giant observation windows, and it shot down into the heart of the ochre mushroom cloud. I caught the snap of a red cape before it was obscured by the haze.

Dust kicked up all around us, settling in a fine brown mist that reached up to our ankles.

There was a lot of hyperbole and over exaggeration regarding this kind of thing. Politicians loved to drum up outrage, and nothing got the masses baying for blood like the concept of children being unsafe in their school environment.

But it wasn’t all bullshit. The practical exam at Hero High was notorious for a reason. People got hurt. Sometimes badly.

“Everyone stick close together,” I managed to say. “And keep an eye out. Be vigilant. I want to see every single person here safe and sound at the finish line in a few hours, understand?”

There was a chorus of agreement, but it sounded hollow.

~~~

Julia waited before a small, murky lake with her arms crossed. Strands of opalescent light shimmered around all her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, giving the look of a glowing wireframe mask, and that should’ve allowed her to locate her quarry in the blink of an eye. Her power was one of the best sensory abilities I’d ever heard of. Genuinely world-class. Destined for greatness in every sense of the word.

But few powers came without weaknesses. Hers was, when I thought about it, pretty obvious.

If she could project her sight so she could see everything in a certain range from every angle, that didn’t do much for her if what she was looking for was hidden within a pool of brown water. Her projected sight was no different from what she could see through her eyeballs, after all.

Still, I could understand how it would be frustrating.

“I’m only going to ask you one more time. Are you going to keep being a complete, utter, and total fucking imbecile, or are you going to pull together that sloshing fishbowl of soup you call a brain and act as if you are capable of acting according to basic common sense?”

Didn’t mean she had to take it out on me, though.

“I’m not going to break my word,” I said, tranquil as a lake.

“Your word,” she repeated with a sneer, as if she’d tasted the phrase and found it unspeakably vile. “What does that even mean? If you promised someone you’d shoot yourself in the face, would you go through with it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t make a promise like that, for one thing…”

“How can you be so sure? It’s not such a long drop from the level of stupidity here to the suicidal nonsense there.”

“But it is. Trust me, I’m not screwing myself over like a chump here.”

“That sounds like an interesting perspective. Go on then, explain to me why it’s a good idea to stand here like an idiot when one of your tasks is less than two hundred metres away.”

I thought fast. “Our whole group could fall apart if I went and did that, and then over twenty people wouldn’t be able to finish their tasks. Not a risk I’m willing to take.”

“And why do all of them deserve to finish their tasks at your expense? Explain that one to me.”

“It’s not about who deserves what. It’s about doing the right thing.”

Julia closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. The glowing lattice over her features faded away until a small ring around her ears remained.

“None of these people deserve your kindness.”

“Yeah? And how do you know that?”

“Because not a single one has spoken up for you, even after you’ve done so much for them already. Anyone with basic decency would have told you it’s fine to go and do your own tasks. Hell, they should’ve offered to complete them on your behalf. All this camaraderie and cooperation going around, and you’re being left out of it. It’s disgusting.”

My eyes were stinging by the time she finished.

Yeah. Just… yeah.

Can’t deny a part of me was hoping for something like that.

“Being a hero can be a thankless job, when you do it right,” I quoted.

Julia glared at me. She opened her mouth, but a resounding splash interrupted her.

The boy with the water manipulation power rose from the lake on the top of a geyser, holding a hard drive triumphantly above his head.

“Got it!” he cried, grinning like a madman. The water spout bore him to the shore, where he presented himself in front of us. Looking at his dry clothes and immaculately styled black hair, you’d never think he’d just been swimming around in muddy waters.

His grin faded as he took in Julia’s stony visage. He held the hard drive out to her like he thought she might snap his hand off. “Got it,” he said again.

She took it and walked away.

I could only watch her go.