Despite everything, Sooyoung tried her best to keep her breathing steady and even. Composure was more than simply keeping a straight back and a placid expression.

Just because there was no one else in the room, didn’t mean nobody was watching. Mother had always emphasised that. There was never a time when she could relax.

It was hard to do so when she’d blundered so spectacularly. Failure hadn’t been an option, and yet here she was.

She should’ve listened to Taeyong. Chasing after that Latina girl had been foolish, but the disrespect had prickled her pride.

Pride cometh before the fall, she thought, and here I am at the bottom.

In all honesty, she was surprised they hadn’t thrown her in a cell. Instead, she’d been shut in a dormitory room, empty while the school was out of term. The room had been stripped bare of anything but the bed and its sheets, and the curtains had been pulled closed. It was no bigger, even including the kitchen and dining area, than her closet back home. At least they’d left the light on.

Her power was a vague presence in the back of her mind, a sixth sense feeding her information wherever she looked. It told her the materials making up the walls, floors, and ceiling, what gases were in the air, even the number of dust motes on the ground, anything she could ‘swap’.

There was no way to describe the sensation to someone without her power, in the same way that one might struggle to explain sight to a man who’d been born blind. All she had to do was open her eyes, flip a mental switch, and she simply knew what could be ‘swapped’ within her line of sight, and how long it would take to do so.

And the list of things that could be swapped was mind-boggling. The things she could physically move around were nothing compared to the concepts her power could latch onto. Sometimes it caught her off guard. It made absolutely no sense to be able to switch another person’s physical traits with her own… without physically affecting either of their bodies.

Most importantly, her power allowed her to swap powers. Not just to herself, but to other people. The time required to complete the process was untenable at her current Level, measured in months and years. The more bizarre the thing being swapped, the longer it took.

But her mother had held high hopes for the future. The Moonlight Queen knew better than anyone how absurd superpowers could grow as one climbed the Shimada Scale.

That was why she’d been named heir shortly after her powers had manifested.

It was also a large part of why she left.

Whatever her powers could potentially do in the future, they were painfully slow now. If she’d had to sit through one more multi-day session just to marginally improve her abilities, she would’ve lost her mind. And that was just one part of life under Mother’s attention.

There had been a moment, a few days prior to her escape, where she’d glanced ahead on her schedule out of idle curiosity. She’d scrolled along three years without finding a day off before she stopped. Every day was blocked out down to the minute, every activity decided for her.

Even humiliated and imprisoned, it was better to be here than there. As long as she was within Aegis Academy, she was out of her mother’s reach.

But she wasn’t going to be here much longer, she knew. They’d be sending her off to incarceration at the first opportunity.

The KMP Group’s reach was vast. Signing up for Aegis’ open admissions test had required use of her full name, so she had no doubt they knew where she was. If she found herself detained in a place where their influence didn’t reach, she’d consider herself the luckiest girl ever to live.

More likely, someone would break her out, and then it would be back to hell for her.

She didn’t believe any of the reports on the chaebol’s downfall. Politicians could puff out their chests for the news cameras all they wanted, but she’d seen those same people in her mother’s office, bowing and grovelling like peasants before a queen. It wouldn’t matter even if they were serious about their intentions to eradicate the chaebol’s influence on South Korea.

As long as her mother lived, so would the KMP Group.

There had been a time when a small part of her held out hope that someone out there would kill her mother, freeing her from the nightmare.

That childish naivety had gone silent ever since two of the most powerful superheroes in the world had succeeded only in stalling her long enough to give their allies time to retreat. The only solace was that the ferocious battle had provided enough of a distraction to let her and Taeyong slip out of her home and away into the countryside. Things had been a bit of an ordeal from there, but the surety of a solid goal always kept them moving forward.

If escaping her mother’s influence was the objective, who better to ally themselves with than the enemy she never was able to score a victory over?

Now, she didn’t know if that path was still open to her.

Regrets never helped anybody. She’d always been taught that the present was the only time worth concerning herself over. The past was immutable, and the future was unknown.

But she couldn’t stop replaying the events of the past few hours over and over in her head. All the stupid, petty mistakes. So many things she could have done better, choices she could have made that would’ve led her down another path. Times when she should’ve been more ruthless. Moments where she should’ve called things off.

They shouldn’t have even followed the Latina girl in the first place, she knew. They’d already done more than enough to distinguish themselves at that point.

But Sooyoung had wanted to approach their potential ally with as much prestige as possible. With the disparity in power, she’d thought they would need to truly impress in the exam to give themselves the best bargaining position.

Now, they had practically none.

Though she flinched a little, Sooyoung wasn’t at all surprised when the floor abruptly changed from brown linoleum to a rippling glass-like surface. Nor was she shocked when three people rose from the ground, like they were being lifted through water on an elevator.

Two of them were nondescript in appearance. In their matching hooded black cloaks and featureless white masks, it was like their image was designed to suppress any hint of individuality. One stayed crouched with a gloveless pale hand pressed to the ground, while the other looked around the room for a moment before giving a thumbs up and then standing to attention.

Her power lingered on them, whispering their secrets into her mind. They seemed armed for war; grenades, guns, knives, all concealed in hidden pockets in the body armour they wore beneath their dark cloaks. It told her more about them, too. All the details of their bodies, their weight, their height, their strengths and weaknesses, and more. They were both in shape, incredibly so, for their young ages, impossible strength and stamina in their wiry muscles.

The boy, a late teen who was remarkably short for his age, had micro-level electrokinesis that, applied carefully, let him manipulate electronics like cameras or phones. It worked on an instinctual level, allowing him to change the behaviour of a device without needing to know the exact details of what was going on. She could rip that instinct out of him, given eight days and thirteen hours, though it wouldn’t do much good for her without his power itself.

Which would take her just under three months to steal.

The girl’s power was simpler, though far more useful, in Sooyoung’s opinion. She could create portals between two locations within a mile of each other on a flat surface. They weren’t direct doors through reality one could just walk or fall through, though, instead transporting people through a fluid-filled not-dimension for a few seconds before reaching their destination. The power granted her a massive-range clairvoyance, and when portals weren’t linked up they could act as slippery surfaces to hinder her enemies.

Six months and something her power considered equal in value to trade, and that power would be Sooyoung’s. Even swapping the powers between the two strange young capes would take two months.

None of that was what caught her attention.

Their skills were… extraordinary didn’t cut it. They were masters of all the weapons and equipment they had concealed on their persons, and more. Acting, espionage, information-gathering, stealth, manipulation, hand-to-hand combat, armed combat, parkour, code-breaking, hacking, programming. They could drive almost any vehicle, speak a dozen languages, twist people to their whims. The list kept going on. Her power fed her all that information in the span of a second, but it took much longer to process and comprehend what she was ‘seeing’.

They were deadly in the extreme, with knowledge so dense it would take her weeks just to ‘swap’ one of them, if she could even find something within herself her power would deem worthy of the trade. She’d spent much of a year around people with extensive training, but never like this.

Even so, they paled compared to the woman they’d arrived with.

People often remarked on how tall and thin Marquise was. They called her skeletal, ghoulish. In real life, Sooyoung didn’t see that at all. The woman had the figure of a fashion model, if not the face. Maybe it was because most people only saw her in her signature white pantsuit and overcoat, rather than the slim black costume she was wearing now. She had high cheekbones, a sharp jawline, dark hair with hints of grey scraped back into a tight bun, and severe silver eyes that pinned Sooyoung in place.

And her power told her absolutely nothing about the woman. She was a black hole to her ability’s analysis. A void in reality.

Only one other person had ever had that effect on her power, and Sooyoung now knew she’d made the right choice in coming all the way here. Even if she’d fucked it up.

Sooyoung straightened her back and placed her hands in her lap. These were hardly ideal circumstances, but what she wanted was right in front of her. Perhaps she hadn’t failed yet, after all.

“Kim Soo-Young. You’ve been desperate for my attention,” Marquise said in flawless Korean.

Sooyoung was taken off guard to the point she almost replied in English before switching to her mother tongue. “I thank you for spending your precious time on me.” She bowed, hating every moment of the action. Supplicating herself was humiliating, but it was hardly like she had any choice when her bargaining position was so weak. “I was planning to offer you my services.”

“Is that so?”

“My power has a lot of potential, if it is nurtured the right way. The kind of potential that made me my mother’s favourite daughter.” Sooyoung gave a bitter smile. “If I had both your personal protection and status as a student at Aegis, even she wouldn’t be able to touch me.”

Marquise raised one eyebrow. “You becoming a student at Aegis Academy seems somewhat unlikely, at this juncture.”

“But not impossible. Given enough time, I could change my appearance completely. I could even change my DNA, so no one would be the wiser.”

“And how much time would you need?”

Sooyoung said nothing, her lips thinning.

“Hm. More than you have. Your family’s people will close in before you can complete the process of disguising yourself, or you would have done it long before now. No, becoming a student is not an option for you. You’ve burned that bridge.”

Despair gripped Sooyoung’s heart. To anyone watching her, they would see nothing more than a slight droop of her shoulders, maybe a tightness around her eyes, or a downward twitch at one corner of her lips. Composure was paramount, after all, now more than ever.

On the inside, it felt like her stomach had just collapsed in on itself. A scream bounced around inside her throat, threatening to escape if she dared to open her mouth. Her eyes stung.

She couldn't go back. She couldn’t.

Sooyoung bowed her head once more. “Let’s not dance around the subject, ma’am. Even if I’ve failed in some of my objectives, you risked coming here tonight because I did succeed in catching your attention. What will it take to earn your protection from my mother?”

For a long moment, silence reigned. Humiliation prickled Sooyoung’s skin, but she kept her head bowed.

Eventually, Marquise spoke. “I already know your character, child. You escaped your mother’s clutches because you wished to regain the freedom you lost when you were abruptly made heir. I have my doubts that you’d be willing to submit yourself to my control, instead.”

“Anyone is better than her.”

“You’re aware I can’t hope to match her physically.”

“From what I understand, you’ve never needed to.”

“Hm. Crude flattery. You’re not very good at social manipulation, Kim Soo-Young. But I suppose someone who’s lived the life you have would never need to worry about that kind of thing. The youngest child rarely gets much attention, in your kind of family.” Marquise moved closer until she was looming over Sooyoung’s bowing form. “You’re stubborn and arrogant. Reckless. If you had more composure and foresight, you would have realised that your power would catch my attention regardless of how you acted in the test. But you let your fear control you, and you went to absurd extremes to try and impress me.”

Sooyoung clenched her teeth. “I am lacking in many ways,” she agreed.

“You are. But you’re not hopeless. I think I can mould you into something greater, with time.”

Sooyoung looked up, her eyes going wide.

“Not at Aegis Academy. Not on the surface of it, at least. No, I’m going to offer you an alternative route of education.”

In her hand, Marquise held out a blank white mask.

“Such is my Providence,” she said.